The white coat: a symbol of science and medicine as a male pursuit.

947 I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN by introducing you to something called DAST, an acronym for the Draw-A-Scientist-Test. David Wade Chambers (1) of Deakin University in Australia created this test in the 1980s in an attempt to determine when children develop ideas about scientists. It is a very easy instrument to administer. You give the subject a piece of white paper and ask them to draw a scientist. I begin each semester of my Science, Technology, and Society course with this test and get results surprisingly similar to what Chambers got with elementary schoolchildren, especially those in the fourth grade or beyond. Most of the drawings are of males, often with facial hair and glasses, and sometimes with beards. Frequently the scientist is holding a beaker, test tube, or other symbol of scientific research, and sometimes there is a laboratory bench with more paraphernalia: a microscope, a flask with vapors pouring from it, a laboratory rat. And as Chambers found, one or two students in each class create images decidedly on the sinister side: wild hair, fangs, an expression of evil intent. But the most ubiquitous element in these drawings is the white coat. Most of the scientists—male and female—are decked out in long, white coats, with the breast pocket often sporting a nerd pack, of course. In the 20th century, the lab coat has become a persistent symbol of science, set quite early in the minds of children and remaining in the minds of adults, despite the fact that many scientists—physicists, geologists, and ecologists to name a few—never wear this piece of apparel. Even where the lab coat is most likely to be seen—among chemists, biologists, and doctors—its importance as an essential piece of haberdashery has weakened. Jeans can actually benefit, fashion-wise, from a few stains or acid holes. In medicine, where some doctors are now importing Parisian coats that have more style than their American counterparts (2), the white coat is suffering from an interesting schizophrenia. Many doctors and other medical personnel have given up wearing it because of such things as white-coat hypertension and white-coat hyperglycemia: a worsening of patients’ symptoms in the presence of white-cladded figures. The white coat has come to be seen as a symbol of separation and alienation, and therefore something to be shed. But at the same time, in the past few years a number of medical schools have instituted a white coat ceremony at the beginning of the first year to initiate students into the medical profession by presenting them with white coats, so while the reality has changed, the symbolism lives on (3). The power of this symbolism is indicated by something called laboratory chic that invaded the fall 1998 fashion season. Designers took the trend toward minimalism that had been around for several years and went one step further, creating starkly simple white clothes reminiscent of those worn in a Silicon Valley clean room or a high-containment germ warfare laboratory. In an article on the trend, David Colman (4) sees it as a penchant for “sterility, calm, safety” (p. 1). So, for the general public, or at least for the general public with an acute fashion sense, laboratory apparel connotes not only cleanliness, but security and peace. This relates to the idea of the laboratory as set off from normal activity and to the scientist as a breed apart. The laboratory coat helped to create this image, and now it is being used to symbolize it. Valerie Steele of the Fashion Institute of Technology has other things to say about laboratory chic that are more disturbing. She argues that the lab coat provides “a combination of the minimal and the medical, with a sort of creepy sadomasochistic edge to it, and it plays into our fears about technology and biotechnology. You’re choosing to look as though you were the one who has the power over life and death” (4; p. 5). This is quite a forceful statement about what until recently was a relatively inexpensive piece of clothing, but it fits in with some of the DAST results. Many people do see scientists as “creepy” and the lab coat as a symbol of this. Steele also sees the white coat as representing visceral power, that it is being physically and totally in control. I think she is right. Putting on a lab coat is more than just a way to protect against spills: it represents a different way of behaving, a different relationship with other people and with the objects of research. The lab coat separates scientists from everyone else. At the university, scientists are the only ones who change their dress in order to do their research, and that dress change is indicative of a thought change: now we are not ordinary citizens with emotional problems and worries