GoKawiilThis essay will appear in our forthcoming book, “Making the Modern Laboratory.”
By Donna Vatnick
In the 1960s, David Chambers, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, instructed teachers to give children a blank sheet of paper and ask them to draw a scientist. Chambers repeated this experiment many times over eleven years, collecting more than 4,800 drawings. The results were surprisingly consistent: white lab coat, glasses, beakers, mysterious machinery, someone saying “eureka!” The study has since been repeated dozens of times. While some details have changed, with beakers replaced by rockets, microscopes by vaccines, or men by women (sometimes), the scientist always wears a white lab coat.
The white lab coat, however, only came to symbolize scientists in the 20th century. Before that, cartoonists satirized chemists by portraying their craft as sorcery whose practitioners wore long dark robes, and painters drew naturalists in waistcoats and breeches against backdrops of plants and landscapes. It was really surgery, more than any other scientific discipline, that gave us the white laboratory coat. Today, scientists don a variety of multicolored, specialized protective equipment to suit the needs of their field, but the fact that children still inextricably link white lab coats to “scientists” says everything about how a simple garment came to exemplify a profession’s public image.
To understand how the white lab coat arose, we have to go back to Victorian England to examine not the scientists, but rather the fashion of that time.
In mid-19th-century England, so-called “gentlemen of science” dressed in dark frock coats. In his 1885 portrait, Louis Pasteur stood in his laboratory, rabies sample in hand, in a black frock coat, waistcoat, and black cravat. Charles Darwin, whose personal home was his “laboratory,” sported a similar style. John Snow, the epidemiologist best known for tracing the source of London’s cholera epidemic, inspected the Broad Street pump while dressed like a banker, in a multipiece suit and tie.
Louis Pasteur (ca. 1885).
This style was influenced by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, who elevated the frock coat into a fitted, double-breasted symbol of class in the 1850s. Though the Prince himself likely never fooled around with specimens and staining chemicals, the darkness of the coats he popularized benefited scientists, who didn’t want the stains of their labors visible. Frock coats were, after all, very tedious to wash in the days before laundry machines.
However, for blood-splattered Victorian surgeons, the situation was much worse; heavy and woolen, the frock coat absorbed just about any fluid. Stories of surgeons making their rounds in bloody black robes reeking of rot and sweat are most likely accurate. The esteemed surgeon Sir Frederick Treves (credited with saving the life of King Edward VII in 1902) reminisced in his 1923 book: “The surgeon operated in a slaughter-house-suggesting frock coat of black cloth. It was stiff with the blood and the filth of years. The more sodden it was, the more forcibly did it bear evidence to the surgeon’s prowess.”
Beyond being filthy, frock coats were also very uncomfortable. The sawing, stitching, and other manipulations of surgery were already messy, laborious work, but operating rooms grew even more “clammy and sodden” after Joseph Lister introduced his carbolic spray antiseptic. Lister himself stripped off his frock and “turned up his shirt sleeves” and “pinned an ordinary unsterilized huckaback towel over his waistcoat (for his own protection, not that of the patient).”
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