page_title: White coat
section_title: White versus black
hierarchical_section_title: White coat / Medicine / White versus black
caption_attribution_description: English: A tie-dyed (or similar process) lab coat being worn by geneticist Emy Monroe at a public demonstration. The process being shown is testing for Asian carp eDNA
context_page_description: A white coat, also known as a laboratory coat, is a knee-length overcoat/smock worn by professionals in the medical field or by those involved in laboratory work. Doctors wear lab coats. The coat protects their street clothes and also serves as a simple uniform. The garment is made from white or light-colored cotton, linen, or cotton polyester blend, allowing it to be washed at high temperature and making it easy to see if it is clean.
  Similar coats are a symbol of learning in Argentina and Uruguay, where they are worn by both students and teachers in state schools. In Tunisia and Mozambique, teachers wear white coats to protect their street clothes from chalk.
  Like the word "suit", the phrase "white coat" is sometimes used as a synecdoche to denote the wearer, such as a scientist working in a high-tech company.
context_section_description: Until the mid-1920s, students who were examining cadavers would wear black lab coats to show respect for the dead. Black lab coats were used in early biomedical and microbiology laboratories. The "whiteness" and "pureness" concepts that were established in medicine pervaded that environment at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries and physicians changed the black for the white coat.
caption: A tie-dyed lab coat
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