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PERSPECTIVE

On White Coats and Professional Development: The Formal and the Hidden Curricula

Delese Wear, PhD

1 November 1998 | Volume 129 Issue 9 | Pages 734-737

White coat ceremonies are a recent phenomenon in medical education.Selected as a symbol by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation to impress upon medical students the importance of compassion and humility, the white coat has had a long association with all things medical, scientific, and healing. It is also associated with the attributes of purity and goodness traditionally symbolized by the color white. Thus, its selection as the material focus of the white coat ceremony seems natural.

This article situates the white coat ceremony as a curricular event and suggests that, in addition to having the meanings cited above, the white coat has other meanings that fall into the realm of the hidden curriculum-it can symbolize caregiving hierarchies and spheres of practice, the social and economic privilege of physicians, and medicine's well-established practices of determining membership in the profession. Finally, this paper suggests several other ceremonies or rituals that may be better than the white coat ceremony for encouraging compassion and humility in medical students.

Author and Article Information

From Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, Rootstown, Ohio. For the current author address, see end of text.
Requests for Reprints: Delese Wear, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, 4209 State Route 44, PO Box 95, Rootstown, OH 44272; e-mail, dw@neoucom.edu.

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