© Photo by Dani Bregman
This past week was my daughter Noa’s white coat ceremony—the moment when first-year medical students receive their white coats shortly after surviving their first set of exams. When I told someone about it, they remarked how moving it must be to think back on my own white coat ceremony, and now my daughter’s—the passing of the torch and all that.
I agreed, of course—so meaningful. To this day, I said, I still remember my own white coat ceremony so vividly. Except that I don’t. I have no memory of it at all. Nor does my mother, whom I interrogated later that night to make sure I wasn’t experiencing early-onset dementia.
Turns out I wasn’t. There’s a good reason for my apparent amnesia: when I was a first-year medical student there wasn’t one. The white coat ceremony was only initiated in 1993, and the first one at the University of Pennsylvania, where I went to medical school, took place in 1995. By then I was nearly finished with med school and already worrying about where I’d match for residency. In my day, we just showed up, got introduced to our cadavers, and were essentially told, “Congratulations, future doctors—welcome to anatomy lab.” Today, roughly 99 percent of medical schools have white coat ceremonies—it’s become as much a rite of passage as the stethoscope.
The tradition began at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, thanks to Dr. Arnold P. Gold, a pediatric neurologist who noticed something missing in medical education. He thought taking the Hippocratic Oath at graduation was four years too late. The white coat ceremony, he proposed, should mark the beginning of a doctor’s journey, not the end. Its purpose was to emphasize “humanism in medicine”—the belief that while medicine is grounded in science, its purpose is to serve people, not pathology. In other words: treat patients, not diseases.
Dr. Gold wanted medical students to hear—early and often—that human connection, not just technical competence, lies at the heart of the profession. It may seem obvious, but he knew firsthand what all of us in medicine eventually learn: that sleep deprivation, rigid hierarchies, endless documentation, billing headaches, overflowing inboxes, and the general irrational vagaries of the healthcare system can wear anyone down and tarnish even the most highly polished idealism.
Noa’s medical school, the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, seems to take that mission seriously. Their students become certified EMTs in their first month—meeting patients before cadavers. I didn’t touch a live human until halfway through my second year. Dr. John D’Angelo, the president and CEO of Northwell Health and an emergency medicine physician, spoke movingly about the empathy shown to him by an attending when he missed a deadly diagnosis as a young resident (his patient was a hospital colleague, no less), and he choked up when describing his feelings of inadequacy while trying to comfort the families of victims of a motor vehicle accident.
But the most striking moment of the ceremony for me came when Noa’s class recited an updated version of the Hippocratic Oath, joined by the parents who were doctors themselves. Standing in the auditorium with Rachel and Noa, repeating the words, I found myself reflecting on how the proximity to youth keeps one young—not just in medicine but in all professions. It reaffirmed the advice I give to my more “mature” patients: find a way to teach, mentor, or help the next generation—not just for their benefit, but for your own.
Idealism can wither with age like anything else, but it always retains the potential for renewal. Which is why the best use of those new white coats may be to dust off some of the faded old idealism their bearers will soon encounter in the auditoriums, hospital wards, and clinics. And if one of those white coats just happens to have your daughter’s name embroidered on it, well, so much the better.
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