Scrubs

How did scrubs get so stylish? And how the heck is it sanitary to wear them in public? For pictures of trendy scrubs, as well as images of the evolution of doctors and nurses clothes, head to https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/ Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I feel like embarrassed about this because in my head, a long, beautiful story about clothing is supposed to come from a place of deep love and cultural appreciation.

• 0:10Avery Trufelman?

  Although I think the best stories about clothes come from a place of deep confusion and curiosity.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Genuinely, the reason that I wanted to learn about this is that I kept seeing ads for scrub companies on the subway.

• 0:23Avery Trufelman?

  I too see ads everywhere for scrubs.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  These garments that I thought were extremely technical and probably like uniforms and provided by hospitals were suddenly consumer goods or fashion goods.

• 0:38Avery Trufelman?

  Scrubs are sold on glossy billboards, worn by chiseled models.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:43Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, and this is Jasper.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  My name's Jasper Davidoff. I am a reporter and a games producer who lives in Brooklyn.

• 0:50Avery Trufelman?

  And one scrub company in particular is putting ads everywhere and really leaning into this fashion thing. Maybe you've seen them. It's this company called FIGS.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  The medical team for the US Winter Olympic Squad was dressed in FIGS and like.

• 1:05Avery Trufelman?

  And did you see Noah Wiley from the pit? Did you see this? He wore a tux designed by FIGS?

• 1:10Speaker 00

  I did not.

• 1:11Avery Trufelman?

  So that's a FIGS tuxedo?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Sure, but that's just a tuxedo.

• 1:15Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, FIGS made a one-off tuxedo that just looks like a tuxedo. Just like their scrubs kind of just look like athleisure, the FIGS thong bodysuit. Did you see that one?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  I did. I was, my jaw dropped.

• 1:30Avery Trufelman?

  The variety of what is now considered scrubs is kind of mind boggling.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  The scrub jumpsuit. This is one word, by the way, scrub jumpsuit.

• 1:38Avery Trufelman?

  Those jogger pants really just look like trendy pants.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  They totally do. But yeah, everything else, he's wearing the FIGS branded New Balance shoes.

• 1:46Avery Trufelman?

  Those are so cool.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Honestly, I would buy those. You know, compounding this question of like, why does this matter? Why is this a brand? It's because you go on the FIGS website and they're just selling like New Balance sneakers, right?

• 1:56Avery Trufelman?

  It seems like these are a little too stylish to just be worn in the hospital and doctors' offices and care facilities.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  What are these actually doing if you can throw them on and get on the subway, which is one of the scariest germlological environments known to man?

• 2:11Avery Trufelman?

  Because this is the other aspect. As Jasper and I start noticing more advertisements for fashionable scrubs, we also start to see more fashionable scrubs actually being worn around.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  I also started noticing everyone wearing their scrubs on the subway, which I have been very attuned to.

• 2:28Avery Trufelman?

  And you see it a lot, right?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  You see it all the time. I mean, I've, I've been tempted so many times to just like go up to someone and be like, are you worried about like seeing patients after this?

• 2:40Avery Trufelman?

  So I recently have been seeing a lot of people wearing their scrubs and noticing people wearing their scrubs on the subway and on the street. And the funny thing is the ones from Memorial Sloan Kettering are really swaggy, which is a cancer hospital. I posted a picture and was like, Memorial Sloan Kettering has the swaggiest scrubs. And there was a flurry of comments under the picture of people being like, this is disgusting. How is that allowed to wear your scrubs on the subway? You know? So I think it further gets to this point of like, are these just clothes now?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100% are these just clothes now.

• 3:13Avery Trufelman?

  What scrubs are for and how companies selling uniforms to doctors and nurses and dentists and veterinarians and healthcare workers have turned to fashion. After the break. Thank you so much for listening to Articles of Interest. Let me just pull back the curtain a little bit and explain how this show works. So the way I eat and pay my rent is because I sell ads on this show. And the reason I like to do it this way is because there's no paywall. Articles of Interest is available to anybody who wants to listen to it. And it wouldn't be possible without Radiotopia. Radiotopia, it's so cool. It's a collective of 21 different podcasts, but we basically pool our resources together and Radiotopia

• 3:54Avery Trufelman?

  is this nonprofit that helps us all out. It's not devoted to maximum profit or extreme expansion. It's just about helping weird little creative shows survive. I love Radiotopia and I'm so proud to be a member. Our annual fundraiser just launched with a goal of 1,500 donors. That's it. 1,500 donors. I think we can do it. Help out Articles of Interest and our entire neighborhood over at Radiotopia by donating today at radiotopia.fm/donate. Thank you so much. I love to plan an outfit that'll really stun. And sometimes I want to take a risk and try out something new, but I don't really want to commit to buying it. But you can

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• 6:48Avery Trufelman?

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• 6:57Avery Trufelman?

  All right, let's not drag it out in a shaggy story. First things first, how the hell can healthcare workers wear scrubs on the subway going to and from work? Take it away, Jasper Davidoff.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  The thing that I find comforting about talking to medical professionals is that often I come in like really wound up about something and they're like, no, this is completely normal. Like chill out. And I felt like Hannah also had this attitude.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  My name's Hannah Newman. I'm the Senior Director of Infection Prevention for the Northwell Manhattan campus. So that's Lenox Hill Hospital, Meath, and Northwell Greenwich Village Hospital in Manhattan.

• 7:30Avery Trufelman?

  If anyone would be preoccupied with the safety and cleanliness of scrubs on the subway, it would be Hannah, the Senior Director of Infection Prevention.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  In an ideal world, like would you change when you got to work? Absolutely. But when you think about it, there's a level of things that sometimes you can't control. We're all exposed to pathogens and bacteria all the time. And really, it's more of what is the risk of that actually transmitting and what's the risk that it's actually going to do harm?

• 7:55Speaker 00

  One of the things that she said right off the bat is that if you have a pathogen that could live on your clothes, then it probably doesn't live that long as opposed to like something that is in a bodily fluid.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yes, clothes can be fomites for bacteria, but for the most part, like it's really not the main mode of transmission.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  She emphasizes that for a lot of these kinds of pathogens, the main barrier that we have that is keeping them from penetrating our bodies is your skin.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  What I worry more about isn't so much the clothes themselves unless you were to have like a open wound or something underneath your clothes.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  If you don't have any lesions or like no one has thrown up or bled upon you, then you're probably for the most part not super likely to transmit something else based on simply what you're wearing.

• 8:39Avery Trufelman?

  To be very, very clear here, we are talking about the vast majority of people wearing scrubs. They're not necessarily getting super messy.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Normal interactions day to day, if you're not going in an OR setting, if there's not going to be blood, it's really less of a risk.

• 8:53Avery Trufelman?

  However, among those who wear scrubs, sometimes there is going to be blood and vomit and open wounds and surgeries. So in sterile, sensitive areas, scrubs are completely different.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  The ORs in these restricted areas are a different story.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, this was one of the first things that I had to learn was that these are basically two different stories.

• 9:16Avery Trufelman?

  Turns out there are two main genres of scrubs.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Let's say personal scrubs and surgical scrubs, right? So personal scrubs are the kind that you are buying from FIGS or whomever. And the guidance for scrubs that are personal scrubs is you can basically wash them at home and people do.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  That's the joy of having scrubs, right? Because you get home, you just toss it right into the wash and you're going to be fine.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And then there is the OR scrub, although the terminology for these varies.

• 9:45Avery Trufelman?

  Depending on the hospital, they can be known as OR scrubs, institutional scrubs, surgical scrubs, whatever you want to call them. These scrubs are provided by the hospital and they stay in the hospital.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Going into the OR where you're opening up body cavities, we want to make sure that we are keeping the environment as sterile as possible. So not only are personnel wearing scrubs in those areas, but there are scrubs that are given to them by the hospital. They have Lenox Hill written on it so that we know that they're ours.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  An OR scrub, like you get it out of the scrub vending machine?

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Essentially a dispensing machine that we would use and you would tap in your badge and you'd get your surgical scrubs for the day.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I called up a friend of a friend who was a pediatric behaviorist, Lauren Ferris Lee.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  And then at the end of the day, you would change out of them and put them back into the dispenser.

• 10:31Avery Trufelman?

  So the surgical scrub, or the OR scrub, or the institutional scrub is not cute. Like really, it tends not to look good on anyone.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Surgical scrubs are very unflattering. Either they were like too small or they were way too big. There's no elastic in them. It's really just that drawstring holding on for its life.

• 10:50Avery Trufelman?

  The surgical scrubs are totally warped from years of repeated wear and intense washing.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  The minimum temperature for hospital laundry is 160 degrees Fahrenheit?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Which is very hot. It's very hot. Yeah. If a hospital is running its own laundry, that process is consuming half to 75% of all of the hot water in the hospital. It takes up 10 to 15% of the energy used by the entire hospital, which is extremely demanding. So basically, if you're a hospital, like you are probably contracting with a medical laundry service in order to get your scrubs and your gowns and your linens clean.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. They have a whole facility. It's upstate somewhere.

• 11:28Avery Trufelman?

  Hannah Newman at Northwell Manhattan again.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  It's a giant warehouse because they're contracting with many hospitals.

• 11:33Avery Trufelman?

  So again, these are two different worlds. The OR scrubs, or the institutional scrubs, are the shapeless, baggy ones that are provided by the hospital and never leave the premises and are washed with powerful medical-grade machines. But the personal scrubs are, of course, the ones that come in stylish jogger pants and scrub jumpsuits and thong bodysuits.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Hannah talked about this Figs Nicks scrub jacket that she owns, which, I mean, particularly like a scrub jacket that is Nicks pattern is just a jacket.

• 12:05Avery Trufelman?

  There are so many options, way beyond Figs.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  This is also interesting. It's like a kimono.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  So I went scrub shopping with a nurse named Madeline Kramer in downtown Brooklyn.

• 12:17Avery Trufelman?

  Could you see a lot of differences between the scrubs? Or did that, were you like, yeah, these are all pretty standard scrubs?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I think Madeline can see a lot of differences. What do you feel about this neckline?

• 12:26Speaker 04

  I don't like it. It's not giving scrub top.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Yay Scrubs, which is the store that we went. Yay. It's called Yay. Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  I don't want to speak ill of Yay Scrubs, but it does seem like a store that's seen better days. Yikes. That's a huge stain.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  That is why we don't like white scrubs.

• 12:42Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, apparently that's kind of what scrub stores are like, like boxes everywhere.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Boxes everywhere, to the point that we were working our way through the labyrinth in order to see every corner of the store.

• 12:53Avery Trufelman?

  So some of the brands were Ava Therese, Healing Hands, Zavate, Janu, so many different brands of Cherokee, Dickies.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Dicky scrubs, those are good. Cherokee scrubs, they're nice.

• 13:04Avery Trufelman?

  Grey's Anatomy.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Pride and true Grey's Anatomy.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  The fact that there are Grey's Anatomy scrubs, of course, it's like a perfect branding opportunity, but Madeline actually has spent a lot of time in these Grey's Anatomy scrubs because Madeline used to work in a hospital system. And they're essentially forced to buy from one provider that the hospital contracts with, and Grey's Anatomy scrubs is what they're using.

• 13:29Avery Trufelman?

  Every hospital and office has their own culture when it comes to scrubs.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Hospitals have very broad and diverse rules.

• 13:39Avery Trufelman?

  Some might demand that you can only buy from a certain brand. Some might insist that you have to shop by color.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Respiratory therapy is navy, and then assistants and staff wear maroon. And then the providers usually wear light blue.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  One of my favorite motifs from Madeline's and my scrub shop visit was that she refused to buy anything because of this rumor that she had heard that the nurses at NYU were about to have to shift from all wearing green to all wearing purple.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  I don't want to buy any more scrubs until this color change. And so I'm like, I guess I'm just doing this.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Every nurse at NYU, I guess, is currently in this limbo about whether they're going to have to replace their entire wardrobe soon.

• 14:18Avery Trufelman?

  So there are institutional rules and also a large degree of personal preference.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  What I look for in scrubs is like, do the pants have pockets?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Madeline talked about how she has this whole very specific pocket system.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  I'll have pens in my right front pocket and then trash in my left pocket. Nothing like gross, but just wrappers and stuff. Sometimes it's hard to get to a trashcan.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  You may be very used to having a bunch of medical trash that you need to put somewhere, and you don't want that to be the same pocket as your phone or your stethoscope, because you need to be leveraging all sorts of things when you're walking around a hospital wing. And so...

• 14:56Avery Trufelman?

  And that's something that Lindsay Johnson, the technical designer at Figs, was also, seems like she spends a ton of time on.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  We have so many pockets built in. I was like, what's that angle? Like, oh, that's a scissor pocket. Duh.

• 15:07Avery Trufelman?

  Lindsay Johnson, one of the technical designers at Figs, spends a ton of time on the fit and utility of the pockets.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  A lot of our garments are built out with a multi-pocket system. Okay, you need pen pockets and all the different tools. We have a whole arsenal in our fit room of stethoscopes and iPads for charting and additional tools. So testing all that functional side of it.

• 15:30Avery Trufelman?

  And of course, Figs is invested in the fashionable side, too, as evidenced by all their fancy ads.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  There's some great fits that you can wear in your day to day, even if you're not in the healthcare field.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Lindsay, the technical designer, was just like, I wear my scrub joggers just like on the street.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  I own Figs where I'm happy to wear them, you know, as joggers out of the house. They look like great pants that wash up incredibly well.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Functionally, there's very little difference between a scrub's set of joggers and a set of joggers. They are basically just clothes.

• 15:59Avery Trufelman?

  Which can get confusing.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Honestly, today, when you see people in scrubs, do you know if it's a doctor, a nurse, or a transport person? No, you don't.

• 16:08Avery Trufelman?

  After the break, how everyone in medicine and care started to wear personal scrubs and what gets revealed in the confusion. After the break.

• 16:22Avery Trufelman?

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• 20:24Avery Trufelman?

  What did doctors and nurses and medical professionals used to wear before they wore scrubs all the time?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  I mean, like, it depends how far back you want to go. I found myself going down the rabbit hole of looking at plague doctor uniforms.

• 20:37Avery Trufelman?

  The scary mask?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 20:39Avery Trufelman?

  It's that creepy mask with the very, very long hooked, bird-like beak.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  The idea is this sort of safe cone of air that lives around your nose and mouth. But the other thing that you don't think about so much when you're picturing the plague doctor is the rest of the getup.

• 20:54Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, right.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Like, they have this gown and they just look like they're dressed in a tent. And all of these other components were sealed with wax, which was this early and kind of prescient attempt to keep pathogens from getting inside.

• 21:09Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, it's like an early hazmat suit or something.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what's interesting is that this is probably, on balance, a better and safer costume for a doctor than what would come 400 years later.

• 21:23Avery Trufelman?

  Because, if you will come with us up to the 1700s and 1800s, general practitioners not dealing with the plague no longer seem to take any health precautions whatsoever in what they wear.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Being a doctor was not super dissimilar from being a barber or being a butcher or being a blacksmith.

• 21:43Avery Trufelman?

  Being a doctor was just another trade.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  People are just like, I know what it takes to heal someone or cut them open or amputate.

• 21:50Avery Trufelman?

  Like, maybe you apprenticed or something, but it wasn't accredited.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  And because of that, the number one part of being a doctor in the 1700s and the 1800s is pretending that you are a doctor.

• 22:03Speaker 07

  You're trying to appear like any gentleman, wearing a black frock coat and being a professional.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Alison Matthews-David is an art and fashion historian at Toronto Metropolitan University.

• 22:13Speaker 07

  There's a painting by Thomas Akins of The Gross Clinic of Surgery. And, you know, the doctor's wearing, in the 1870s, he's wearing a frock coat, which is a black coat.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  This is the age of these very stately frock coats. The frock coat is very dark, which is supposed to make you look eminent, but is also supposed to downplay the fact that you're always covered in blood.

• 22:34Speaker 07

  Doesn't show blood stains.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Because obviously, these weren't getting washed.

• 22:38Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, nothing was getting washed in the 1800s hospital.

• 22:42Speaker 07

  Hospitals throughout most of the 19th century were not hygienic places. They were the last place you wanted to go. If you could afford it, you'd obviously have a private practitioner come to you.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  A hospital was like the lowest of the low, where no one was really washing their clothes at all.

• 22:56Speaker 07

  Patients just wore their own clothing, which often, I mean, again, if you were poor enough to have to come to the hospital, you likely wouldn't have had clean laundry.

• 23:04Avery Trufelman?

  And man, there used to be a high tolerance for dirty clothes.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  It was normal for pretty much any given person to be covered in blood in the 1800s. And actually, people were walking around specifically covered in blood. Like, there's this anecdote in this piece by these Australian historians, Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones, where they talk about how murderers would walk around in the same garments in which they had inflicted their crimes. They themselves would be covered in blood and the cops wouldn't flag them and no one would catch them because it was simply completely normal to be covered in blood.

• 23:40Avery Trufelman?

  And doctors, even more than the average person, were especially covered in blood.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  And actually, because of this sort of culture in which you wanted to get your hands dirty as an 1800s doctor, it was a good thing. You would be proud to be covered in blood.

• 23:56Avery Trufelman?

  Proudly walking around actively infecting patients.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Surgery departments in 1800s hospitals are so deadly, extremely deadly. Like, four out of five deaths in surgery departments at this point are caused by infection.

• 24:09Avery Trufelman?

  Then germ theory was discovered, which changed the way medicine was practiced.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  The main thing that changes from 1860 to like 1910 is the idea that sanitation in medicine is important. As a surgeon, you should wash your hands between operations. You should sterilize your clothes and sterilize your instruments. Beeswax comes back as a thing that you can put on your clothing in order to create a barrier between you and the microbes.

• 24:37Avery Trufelman?

  Like doing what the old plague doctors used to do.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 24:40Avery Trufelman?

  And importantly, something else that goes on during this time is that as the practice of medicine is changing, the culture of medicine is changing.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  We get from surgery being this trade, right? This thing that you sort of just like pick up and maybe you're apprenticed in, to a fully like academic field. We get the academicization of medicine as we know it and something that you get credentialed for and that comes from this place of the scientific method and that you do in a way that does not actively kill your patients.

• 25:12Avery Trufelman?

  Medicine needs to show that it has changed.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Medicine is modern and medicine is sleek and clean.

• 25:18Avery Trufelman?

  Medicine, in other words, needs a rebrand.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  The look is also this thing that is thought to have to change.

• 25:24Speaker 07

  Professionalism starts to be associated with this new badge of office, which is the white coat.

• 25:29Avery Trufelman?

  Art and fashion historian Alison Matthews-David again.

• 25:32Speaker 07

  It does have to do with hygiene and not show, I mean, you have to keep it clean because it will show stains, it will show dirt.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  So there's this idea that you should have a garment that is clean, but you should also have a garment that looks clean.

• 25:44Avery Trufelman?

  Clean as in sleek and elegant and modern. White shows this very, very well. Like, that's the reason iPods were white.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  These historians, Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones, who studied the sartorial history of doctors, have this idea that the color white was in relation to this broader cultural trend of modernism and specifically Le Corbusier-inspired buildings. And of course, there's all of these other ideas about white, the color white in science and in medicine. This is a mark of learnedness and of purity. And we're doing something scientific, so we should look like we have this kind of formal, standard garment that will give us that sense of authority. Basically, by, let's say, 1900, the 1910s, everyone's wearing white.

• 26:31Speaker 07

  In 1889, you see another surgical painting called The Agnew Clinic, another famous image where everyone's wearing white, the nurses in a white apron.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And then what happens with doctors is that this tangential thing happens to them wearing all white, which is electrification. So suddenly, you're in operating rooms that are very bright, where you can see everything, which is great. But it also means that, for the first time, you are basically in a white box where everything that you're staring at is kind of blinding you.

• 27:01Avery Trufelman?

  Right.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  And so in 1914, this surgeon from San Francisco, Harry Sherman, is like, we have to fix doctors' uniforms. And what he proposes is this pastel green color because it is thought to be both soothing to the eyes and, more importantly, it's complementary to the color of blood. So you've got green across the color wheel from red and there's just some balance within the operating room. That starts to happen in like the 20s and the 30s. And that's the first evolution of like the modern scrub, where it's this cotton material and it looks like tones of green and blue that you would expect to see in a hospital today.

• 27:36Avery Trufelman?

  So that is the origin of the surgical scrub or the OR scrub, whatever you want to call it. But that doesn't explain how everyone started wearing personal scrubs all the time, especially nurses.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Nurses have sort of a separate path.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  The nursing leadership was always concerned about how things look.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  So to learn more about the history of nurses' outfits, I talked to this historian named Christina Bates.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  I'm Tina Bates. I'm a retired history curator from the Canadian Museum of History.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  And Tina is particularly interested in the history of nurses' uniforms.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  We created a Canadian nursing history collection and it resulted in a book called The Nurses' Uniform Cultural History.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Nursing as a field is kind of older and a little bit more consistent than the history of doctors. It has this longer through line in England that comes from women of convents or women of the cloth doing this service for people in which they were changing bedpans and like keeping people clean and bathed and like...

• 28:44Avery Trufelman?

  Taking care of the sick, yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Before nursing schools, nurses were really working-class women who either worked in hospitals, just dreadful hospitals, or they worked in private nursing, so they went to middle-class people's homes to look after people or to do midwifery.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And so when Florence Nightingale comes around in the early 1800s and is trying to picture a nurse of credibility, she's thinking of essentially like...

• 29:10Avery Trufelman?

  She's trying to create a professional, like, middle-class workforce of nurses.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 29:16Avery Trufelman?

  Florence Nightingale was the founder of the modern profession of nursing.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  And so she's trying to create a way to standardize the workforce, basically.

• 29:23Avery Trufelman?

  Making nursing something that has standards and a rigorous, proper training associated with it.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  She started the school in England and then shortly thereafter, in the 1870s, nursing schools also opened up in Canada and the United States.

• 29:38Avery Trufelman?

  And all of these nursing schools were run by hospitals. This was very vocational. Nursing was not yet taught in the universities.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  There is this kind of parental relationship between the nursing school and the nurse.

• 29:53Avery Trufelman?

  All of these early nursing schools very much follow the ideas of Florence Nightingale, who wanted to present nurses as professional, respectable women.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  You have a long, black dress.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Long dress, of course. This is late 19th century. Then over top of the dress, there would be a bib attached to an apron that went down almost to the bottom of the dress.

• 30:15Avery Trufelman?

  This long apron and bib became the signature nurse look.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  The apron with the bib were essential to maintaining hygiene. They would have the bib and apron that they could change if it got soiled. And then, of course, they had the cap.

• 30:30Avery Trufelman?

  A little pleated cap that you would pin in your hair.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  They were folded and attached to the head.

• 30:35Avery Trufelman?

  They kind of look like old diner waitresses or some, they look like 1950s diner waitresses, but it's in, whatever, the 1800s.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, the association with a waitress or like a service job is pretty apt.

• 30:47Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, the outfit is like half nun, half maid.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  This association between nurses and maids is a really important part of their history because they're the ones who are ensuring that things are sanitary to a degree, or at least tidy.

• 31:01Avery Trufelman?

  This idea of the nurse wearing the dress and the bib and the apron and the little cap gets a bit cemented, even though it's constantly adjusted to fit the fashions of the time over the decades.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  In the 1890s, there was a puff sleeve in women's dresses. And a lot of the nurses had uniforms that followed that fashion. Nothing to do with nursing, just they wanted to be in fashion.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  I think there's never a point at which they don't want to project that nursing is like, cool.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Certainly, in the flapper era, the uniform shape followed the fashion as it always had.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  This image is from 1949, and you can see the sleeves have gotten shorter and the hat has gotten a little bit more fashionable.

• 31:43Avery Trufelman?

  Even though they are tweaked and evolved with different cuts and sleeves and trendy little accents, that essential look of dress, bib, apron, cap really does go on for a while.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  That lasts quite a long time.

• 31:55Avery Trufelman?

  A profoundly long time.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  It was a dress and it had an apron and it had a bib.

• 32:01Avery Trufelman?

  Someone I spoke with was this nurse named Maureen, who graduated from nursing school in 1969.

• 32:09Speaker 06

  I went to the Philadelphia General Hospital School of Nursing. Every nursing school had its own cap, its design. It looked like a cupcake.

• 32:16Avery Trufelman?

  And Maureen worked at this strange nexus where she was still expected to wear pantyhose and a little cap.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  You had to wear white stockings and white shoes, and we used to have inspections. One of the nursing instructors who inspected us, you're really gonna love this. She said, "A nurse with dirty shoelaces probably has dirty underwear."

• 32:38Avery Trufelman?

  And yet, at the same time, Maureen was on the cusp of more contemporary nursing. And she would go into the operating room and wear surgical scrubs.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Nurses wearing scrubs in the operating room is starting in like 60s, 70s. Both doctors and nurses within operating rooms are wearing this relatively modern version of scrubs.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  We wore scrubs in the OR, in the operating room. Yeah, you got them off a cart.

• 33:03Avery Trufelman?

  Maureen lived in both worlds, surgical scrubs and little cap and bib.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  We wore pantyhose under our scrubs.

• 33:10Avery Trufelman?

  The uniform of nursing changed as the job got more professionalized, more academic, and nurses became qualified medical experts in their own right.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  You start with this idea that nurses should look nice and neat and clean. And then you get into this idea where the amount of fashion that nurses are allowed to display is a direct correlation with how much power they have. As we get from the 60s into the 70s, we're starting to get into like the real like gender liberation period in which the idea that anyone can tell you what to wear starts getting like very anathema.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  When the miniskirt came in, oh my goodness, that posed quite a problem.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  The hem of the skirt starts like coming up a little bit.

• 33:51Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, they're following the miniskirt trend.

• 33:53Speaker 06

  Supervisors had a hard time getting their student nurses to lower their skirts. So that's when nursing schools started to allow nurses to wear pants.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Gasp, nurses wearing pants, which is like a crazy idea that also helps them walk around and bend over and lift things up and like do their job.

• 34:13Avery Trufelman?

  Nurses started to decide for themselves what to wear.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  And you start to see the first little hints of manufacturers creating nurse uniforms that are sold directly to the nurses as opposed to the nursing schools and the hospitals having this monopoly over what they were allowed to wear.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  The nurses decided that they should be able to wear scrubs as well.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Some nurses are wearing these operating room scrubs. And like, the important thing to know is if you are a nurse working in an operating room or an intensive care unit, you have prestige, you have clout. You're doing things that are more demanding than nurses in other wings of the hospital. And so other nurses kind of glean that this is a sign of independence and like fullness of self. And that's the point at which they start cajoling to be able to put on this sign that they have authority and clout.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  It used to be that the only people who wore their personal scrubs were nurses.

• 35:09Avery Trufelman?

  Nurses really pioneer this idea of personal scrubs. Then doctors followed.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Doctors' relationships to scrubs have actually been changing quite recently.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  When I was in medical school, people still had this really kind of old school idea that you needed to be wearing business attire and a coat for any rotation that didn't require you to be in scrubs.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Luckett Lean is an emergency room physician in Ontario.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I am an emergency physician and pediatric emergency physician at a number of different sites in Ontario and Canada.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  When she was in medical school, which is not that long ago, we're talking the 2010s, she says, "The rule for rotations was very old fashioned. You were wearing business attire and a white coat for basically any shift in which you didn't need to be wearing scrubs," which is a big change. And also something that feels a little familiar to me. Like, when I would imagine going to a doctor's appointment, when I was a kid, I would picture like a tie, you know? And I do feel like my checkups lately have been a lot more like walking in in scrubs or a white coat in scrubs, which is something that I had never really thought about.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  By the time I started residency, people were starting to wear scrubs more often.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Over the last 10 years, she says, basically everyone, including the doctors, is wearing scrubs all the time.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  And then came COVID and we began to be wearing scrubs all the time.

• 36:31Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, it feels not that dissimilar from the casual revolution at work. Like, people just kind of want to be more comfortable all the time. And so it seems like they kind of found this amazing way to make comfortable clothes that we still read as professional.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Because there's a few studies that have been done on this where they tried to see how doctors' appearance in terms of how they dressed affected how patients perceived them.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  There's this whole discourse around ways to make patients trust you, as you might imagine. And one of the ways is to kind of like get off of this power dynamic and also not be reinforcing this border of expertise by wearing a tie.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  The patients actually preferred when physicians were wearing scrubs as opposed to more formal attire.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  But the flip side of this for Luckett, and I think for almost every medical worker who was a woman that I talked to, is that if you are a doctor and you are wearing scrubs, people will read you as a nurse.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm always assumed to be somebody other than a doctor.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  She is always wearing her badge, which says Dr. Lean. She has embroidery on her chest that says like Dr. Lean.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  I'll go through an entire examination with them and then they'll say, "But when do I get to see the doctor?"

• 37:43Speaker 00

  People are always asking her for like blankets.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, all the time. It's worse for my wife. She's Asian and she gets assumed to be housekeeping quite a lot, which is, guys, do better. People, do better. It can be tricky. And I think the fact that maybe we're not wearing our business casual and heels anymore and instead wearing scrubs, it might have a little bit to do with that. Or, more correctly, probably has a lot to do with unveiling other people's biases about who belongs in medicine and who belongs in which roles in medicine.

• 38:20Avery Trufelman?

  But there are ways of telling who is who in the hospital. It's just that now it mostly comes down to tiny sartorial differences between scrubs.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  There is this whole lexicon of what you should or shouldn't wear based on what you want to project about either your status as a doctor or your competence as a nurse. And it's so specific to what your colleagues think and know.

• 38:42Avery Trufelman?

  Again, all of this is totally culturally different, hospital to hospital. But Luckett travels around to different hospitals and has observed a lot of these differences.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  If you see anybody who's wearing scrubs that looks festive in some way or that has some sort of exciting pattern on it, you're gonna read that as being nurse.

• 38:59Avery Trufelman?

  Different cuts of scrub are associated with doctor and with nurse.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  How tight people wear their scrubs is a big deal. So if you're wearing tight scrubs, people will assume you're a nurse. And if it looks looser, then you might be a doctor.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  And there is these other like intricacies. She was told, "Don't put your stethoscope in your scrub pocket," which is something that nurses do all the time.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Either having it around your neck or I have a hip holster.

• 39:23Avery Trufelman?

  And that's not even counting some of the other personal rules that doctors and nurses might have around dress.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  I work in an area where there are lots of Mennonites and there are some Mennonite nurses and they wear full skirts.

• 39:33Avery Trufelman?

  You talk to a nurse who even just sews her own.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Yes. Asadu is a patient technician and she's Muslim.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  At the beginning, I did not like the way my uniform was printed on me.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  And after a while, she was basically like, "Screw it. These are literally just clothes."

• 39:49Speaker 03

  I think I can make this one from Zoom, which is back in my country, West Africa.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And so she gets the material that works for her in bulk and she gives them to a tailor.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  I make this scrub below my knee, so I make it longer. And my sleeve is long too. I make like long sleeves.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  She was so nonchalant about it. And she's like, "Yeah, no one really like notices or cares." So as long as the color is right, that they don't really care what you're wearing.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they don't complain.

• 40:13Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, it was hard not to think that scrubs were sort of a scam or a racket if it's like, these are just clothes. Like, what makes scrub scrubs?

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I guess I never fully got to the idea that they were like meaningless. There's a way in which I classify scrubs these days mentally as something in the genre of work wear. And I think the fact that the retail scrub industry has gotten so diverse breaks down this idea that scrubs are special because there are so many evidently different ways of wearing them and so many ways of making them functional. So like, the fact that they are not special in the certain way that you might imagine that they are doesn't make them meaningless.

• 40:58Speaker 06

  You have this sense that you've been now initiated into this profession and you're suited up, ready to do battle.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I tried to ask people about the first time that they had worn scrubs and just the way in which they shifted into this vibe of being someone who belonged in that outfit. And I think that there is this modicum of respect that even just wearing a blank, generic scrub should afford you. And that does like, you know, it gives me a sense of who someone is just when I see someone on the subway in their daily like scrub uniform.

• 41:33Avery Trufelman?

  And now, the huge variety of options for scrubs might obscure someone's specific role, but it might tell you just a little bit more about who they are as a person.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  I'm now aware that a scrub can be like a $15 v-neck that you find in a bargain bin or it can be like an $80 fashion item that you've chosen specifically for its sizing and for its collar and for its material. We're not just doing this binary of like, oh, you're wearing scrubs on the subway. You're coming from work.

• 42:04Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, you'll pay more attention to the choices.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:06Avery Trufelman?

  Now that you're not questioning their cleanliness.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  No, now we're chill.

• 42:11Avery Trufelman?

  Thank you to Jasper Davidoff for reporting this story. Music, as ever, by Ray Royal, Lelitone and Sasami. With special thanks to Hannah Cressy, Ellie Lobavitz, Max Hauck, Jerry Pozniak, Anne Bisanette, Mitchell Etsberg and Rowan Macy. To see images of the evolutions of doctors' uniforms and nurses' scrubs, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com.