men's aprons

[hanktrent]

It's a few years later (1875), but there's Eakins' painting The Gross Clinic.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/e/e...oss_clinic.jpg

Boggles my mind that these guys didn't even turn back their white cuffs!

A decade passes, and in the 1880s at the Agnew Clinic, by the same painter, there's white aprons, coats and smocks galore: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/www/busm/sg/images/agnew_.jpg

In looking for period photographs of surgery, I ran across the following pair of images, which I'm not familiar with. By the way, I didn't find any aprons.

Same guys, different poses, but apparently showing different steps in the same amputation:

http://lifeboat.com/images/ether.civil.war.jpg

http://www.viewimages.com/Search.asp...partner=Google

On the pro-apron side, check out page 31 in Dr. Gordon Dammann's Pictorial Encyclopedia of Civil War Medical Instruments, Vol. II. Four "hospital attendants with a staff chaplain," and all of them wearing half aprons. Why the chaplain too? I'm wondering if it's misidentified, and it's a Masonic thing? The picture's too poor to see if there's any detail on the aprons.

Also, a Frenchman visiting Guy's Hospital in London wrote that in England, 1859, female nurses did the hands-on work during official visits, but in France the male students "to whose care the wounded are confided, and who themselves wash the parts, change the dressings, and assist the Surgeon in putting up the fractures... cover their worst clothes with a white apron."
http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA6...=0&output=html

Similarly, a German visiting Edinburgh noted the "calmness and elegance" of the surgeon and "wished that some of our surgeons who are in the habit of tucking up their sleeves and donning a large apron before commencing an operation, had been spectators." http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA5...=0&output=html

So there's some evidence of civilian aprons in other countries, but I haven't run across good examples in America yet.

I'm curious now when the cliche of the Civil War surgeon in an apron began, if indeed it's a later myth. It's not just a reenactorism, as a modern google books search will show: it's all over in fiction and narrative history. http://books.google.com/books?lr=&ou...G=Search+Books

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[hta1970]

Hank,

It seems all too common for "historical works to be filled with grevious errors.

For example, the often quoted "Doctors in Gray." On page 23 the author "quotes" Army reglautions describing the Confederate medical officers uniform including a cap with the letters "M.S." embroidered in gold on the front of the cap. The author clearly never read a copy of the Confederate Army uniform regulations because nowhere does it mention such cap device. Yet hundred of people buy the book and read what it says and takes the written word to be fact. And still other "researchers," not content with primary source research rely on Mr. Cunningham's "expert research" and list him as the source for their research. And before long everyone is writing the same thing.

I would think that for armies which kept track of every single item which was issued to the troops, for the apron, which "popular immagination" has come to look to as a required item for ever medical officer attending to the kool-aid man, there would be at least some reference in official papers, requistions, etc as to this item being provided to hopsitals or regimental medical staffs.

[Robert A Mosher]

Out of curiousity, I went to Google Books and did a couple of different searches with combinations of surgeon, apron, etc. and even narrowed the dates to 1700 to 1880 (to capture memoirs, etc.). The results included enough different dates and both fiction and non-fiction works to show, I would argue, that the image of the surgeon's apron was already a well-established one both in the public's mind and also in the profession. However, there was at least one book on surgery and medicine that appeared to imply that in a peacetime hospital, those attending a surgeon and not the surgeon himself would wear white aprons.

Unfortunatley, there was little in the results that would help clarify whether the apron was general a personal purchase of the surgeon like the rest of his wardrobe or even considered to be so humble as to be regularly thrown away and replaced with a new one, like bandages, etc.

Robert A. Mosher