14 December 2014
The Whiter Coat
I hadn’t worn it in a year. Halfway through internal medicine residency,
I’ve lost two of my allotted four. But yesterday, for the Millions March in
NYC, I donned my white coat under the banner of “White Coats for Black Lives,”
over jeans, under scarf and knit hat. Doctors worldwide wear stethoscopes—a
necessary tool, used for heart-lungs-belly-neck. A patient feels taken care of
if you’ve listened to her heart and lungs. We have the laying on of hands and
the laying on of stethoscope diaphragm and bell. Doctors worldwide wear white
coats, a tool of nothing but repository for tools, a signifier of
identification, power, an instrument of implementing hierarchy, and whatever
else (including the positive) that is associated with the profession. With
power comes implied responsibility, a mandate to earn the given trust.
Before even my first day of medical
school, we received our white coats in a ceremony, parents came and took
pictures, and we solemnly recited the Hippocratic oath, months before touching
our first patients. A symbol of induction into the lifelong guild. For students,
the white coat is short, still symbolizing power to patients perhaps oblivious
to the length, but clearly showing the lowest rank to other doctors. It takes
so many years to arrive at medical school. We had made it. Quickly, I learned
to hate the coat, resent it, except for its many practical pockets, and I
relished the rotations—pediatrics and psychiatry—that didn’t require and even
discouraged its use. In my social medicine program, there is something vaguely
uncool about the white coat, the long white coat we worked so hard to achieve.
I wore it for the protest, yesterday, faint ink marks still visible after
hospital dry cleaning, in a contingent of many others---to show we know We are
an institution, We are implicit and complicit, and We, in positions of power,
are here in solidarity because, among other things, racism is bad for health.
But to reject the whiteness of the
coat requires whiteness, no need for cloth that soon shows sweat stains to
confer that final privilege.
