One of the benefits of going to a large teaching hospital in the 1950s was that no matter what was wrong with you, you stood a fighting chance that somebody there knew how to treat it—or at least had heard of whatever was wrong with you.
On the other hand, one of the major drawbacks was that it was a teaching hospital and, consequently, had all these students and interns hanging about the place.
You’d be in your bed, innocently trying to get the screen of your Etch-a-Sketch® completely black, and suddenly you would be surrounded by a herd of student doctors, led by a professor explaining the subtle indications and finer points of a knee/ankle/elbow/whatever bleed.
For some reason, they always felt the need to draw the curtains around your bed. Then they’d stand there grinning at you. They’d ask a few tentative questions and earnestly note the answers. Sometimes they’d poke at the joint, like it was a suspect tomato, or put their hand on it and be surprised at how cold it was. The professor would wisely point out that it was probably the result of being packed in ice for the last several days. If you were lucky, one of them would remember to open the curtains back up when they left.
Interns would wander in and out—often with a third-year med student bouncing around behind them—to start an IV or ask how you were doing. For the most part they were pretty harmless, but you still had to keep an eye on them. When they weren’t trying to impress the nurses or the attendant med student, they were prone to “borrowing” your latest issue of Mad magazine.
Along with the medical students, there were student nurses of various levels going about their assignments; transporters putting you on a stretcher to go down to X-ray or physical therapy; volunteers wanting to take you to a concert of klezmer lullabies on the 12th floor sun deck; RNs showing a student nurse how to hang your AHG; and a half-dozen other types doing whatever it was they were supposed to do.
The thing that made it possible—for me, at least—to keep track of who could do what to me was the uniform. You could instantly distinguish between a student, an intern, a resident or chief of service.
Nurses, of course, had their white uniforms and caps. The neat thing about a nurse’s cap was that it quite often told you what school she had gone to. (Until the late ’70s, I only knew of one male nurse.) Student nurses had blue pinstriped uniforms, and the stripe on her cap told you what year she was in. Orderlies, nurses’ aides and even the janitorial staff were readily recognizable, although transporters and porters both wore the same outfit. (Transporters moved people, and porters moved things, a subtle but very important distinction.)
You knew that the bleary-eyed guy dressed all in white getting ready to replace your IV at 3 a.m. was an intern and that was what interns did. You also knew that the young woman with no stripe on her cap was a sophomore, and the only thing she could do was bring you your breakfast and bath water. The lady in the pink smock was a volunteer, and she was probably going to ask you if you wanted to go to the chapel or make a corsage for your mother. This knowledge gave you a certain amount of security.
When I go into the hospital now, everyone looks pretty much the same. They either wear a lab coat—usually with street clothes on under it—or scrubs or both. I know scrubs are more practical and comfortable than the old starched, white dresses, but when your brain is wrestling with a healthy dose of morphine, you are often not quite up to figuring out if that person should really be messing about like that. After all, this person’s outfit is pretty much the same as the person’s who just mopped your floor, except their shirt has garish circus animals on it instead of Winnie the Pooh.
In theory, everybody has a nametag that identifies them and their job, but often it’s worn backward so you can’t read it. Even if it is facing you, the print is small and it’s moving around and that morphine is interfering with your speed-reading skills. You don’t know if the person who just came in is a doctor, nurse, lab tech, phlebotomist, insurance company spy, some kind of therapist or from housekeeping.
Oh, well, I guess I just have to take it on faith that the person in a lab coat is a phlebotomist. Who else would be in your room at 5 a.m. with a tray full of needles and syringes?