College of Medicine Presents White Coats to Incoming Students

By Jon Parham

 An incoming freshman medical student receives the white physician coat.
An incoming freshman medical student receives
the traditional white physician coat.

Aug. 9, 2010 | The 174 students in the College of Medicine Class of 2014 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) took their first steps toward becoming physicians when they received their brand-new white physician coats in an Aug. 6 ceremony.

Family and friends joined UAMS faculty members for the traditional White Coat Ceremony celebrating all that the students had accomplished to get to medical school – and to send them on the four-year journey ahead. In addition to receiving their white coats, which symbolizes their commitment to the profession, the students recited the Medical Student Oath, intended to impart professionalism, ethics and integrity.

College of Medicine Dean Debra H. Fiser, M.D., told the students that the ceremony was a reminder that medical school was as much about instilling the highest professional and ethical standards as it is about medical knowledge.

“You are donning a time-honored emblem of the medical profession,” Fiser said. “White is a symbol of purity and the white coat represents purity through professionalism in medicine. Wearing the white coat is a statement of your commitment, not only to the science of medicine, but also to humanity.”

The tradition of the White Coat Ceremony started 17 years ago at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where Arnold Gold, M.D., was a pediatric neurologist. Gold realized that the four years of medical school shape a student’s concept of professional behavior, Fiser said, and waiting to recite the traditional Hippocratic Oath at graduation was really too late.

Today, Fiser said, most medical schools hold such a ceremony for incoming freshmen.

Fiser noted that the incoming freshmen students represented 8 percent of the 2,097 who applied for admission to the College of Medicine this year.