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Health and care

Health and care

The largest uniformed workforce in most countries, and the one whose dress changed most in the twentieth century.

Collection: Health and Care

Every type of health and care in one place — 5 chapters, Clinical medicine, Nursing, Allied health and the rest, with the plates and an inventory to download.
Plates from the Nametape archive of health and care

The Coat Was Black First

Medicine spent most of the nineteenth century in black frock coats and changed to white in about a generation. The switch was not about hygiene. It was a claim to be a science.
A seventeenth-century physician in black, a rail of white lab coats, and a surgeon in modern scrubs

The Nurse’s Cape

Lined in a colour that identified the school, worn outdoors over a uniform designed for indoors. The cape is the only part of Victorian nursing dress that survived into living memory.
A nurse's outdoor uniform in watercolour, an American Red Cross nurse photographed in 1918, and a 1944 uniform dress