Before moving to the United Kingdom, my life looked very different. I lived in a small town and I worked as an EMT on an ambulance. Professionally, it lasted only a few months, but on a human level – as a student and as a volunteer – it shaped me for more than three years. I saw that organization as an extended family, one that had raised me through evening courses, hours of drills and practice sessions, but also dinners, fundraising events, my first postgraduate exams, love stories and the heartbreak that inevitably followed.
When I was accepted onto the PhD program, a few days before leaving I received a message from a colleague: in a gentle yet firm tone, she asked me to return my uniform – my uniform with my service number, old, worn, frayed at the edges, but still mine. I cried, and that reaction surprised no one more than myself. It was, after all, just an object I was attached to.
It was precisely that reaction, though, that made me stop and ask myself: beyond the emotional bond, what does a medical uniform do, and how does it produce professional authority?
Medical Uniforms as a Source of Professional Authority
In sociological terms, the medical uniform operates as far more than a practical garment: it is a boundary object, a tool that expresses internal and public legitimization through dynamics of struggle and persuasion (Larson 1977; Freidson 1970; 1988). As a boundary object (Star & Griesemer 1989), it holds a stable identity across social actors – patients, nurses, physicians, administrators – while acquiring different meanings for each: a promise of competence to the patient, a marker of role and hierarchy within the hospital, and a token of institutional belonging for the practitioner. At the same time, the uniform materially signals who has legitimate access to the domain of care. It embodies the concepts of professionalism not only as knowledge, but as a moral and evaluative claim. It is the concept of struggle at work in drawing the boundaries between those practitioners worthy of the title and those who are not, between experts and non-experts (Larson 1977). The uniform plays a crucial role in public legitimization. Its visual codes – cleanliness, order, disciplined simplicity – translate professional expertise into an immediately legible symbol, one that naturalizes trust and stabilizes the inherently fragile relationship between patient and practitioner. In this sense, the medical uniform is not merely worn but performed: an artifact that enacts professional identity and expertise.
And what might it have represented in an ancient Greek context? In short, did the clothes make the doctor, or not?
In ancient Greece, too, clothing was not peripheral but constitutive of a dimension of legitimacy. Examining this continuity between past and present offers a new way to understand why uniforms still matter: why they move us emotionally, why they shape public trust, and why they have always been entangled with the boundary between expertise and deception. By placing ancient Greek medical self-presentation within this sociological framework, this article does not simply trace a historical precedent for modern medical attire. It argues that the visual regulation of expertise has long been central to medical authority, revealing the uniform as a durable symbol of trust rather than a contingent cultural accessory. This perspective also complicates standard narratives of medical professionalism, which locate its emergence primarily in formal mechanisms such as licensing, examinations, and legally conferred titles. By foregrounding appearance, self-presentation, and public recognition, it suggests that professionalism can operate through social and visual regulation even in the absence of institutionalized credentials.
Dressing the Healer: Authority, Appearance, and Deception in Ancient Medicine
Menander in the fourth century BC had similar thoughts. At the end of the Act II of the Aspis, the brother of the pompous Smicrines, Chairestratos, pretends to be dead, and a false physician is called upon to explain his sudden departure. Here it the physician: an intellectual, a foreigner who speaks in a Doric dialect, whose mannerisms reflect those of a figure from an urban environment (Men. Asp. 373-379). His garments? Prokomion, klanis and bakteria: a wig, an elegant cloak and a walking stick, all three symbols of spatial itinerancy and social eminence.
This seemingly ordinary trio contains within itself the core dimensions of medical professionalism in ancient Greece: these are elements that conferred authority, ensured recognition as well as a form of protection, and indicated the mobility that characterized the profession at the time. They are also objects with a clear status affiliation: physicians were indeed workers, but in most cases they belonged to an elite stratum of workers – individuals with substantial incomes, official public roles, richly furnished tombs, and long lists of titles.
A physician’s identity extended far beyond the purely epistemic and ethical domains: being a doctor also involved possessing a certain set of visual, physical, and aesthetic traits. A physician was expected not only to be skilled, but also to be attractive; it is no accident that the expression kalos kai agathos, the aristocratic ideal of perfection, appears in the opening of the treatise On the Physician (Hipp. Med. 1; cf. Hipp. Test. A1; B1; C1). This should not surprise us: a healthy and beautiful body was the primary calling card of a qualified professional, a guarantee of his healing abilities.
What other details needed attention? “Visits, speech, demeanor, the clothing; in relation to the patient, the hair, the nails, the smell” (Hipp. Epid. VI 4.7). Beyond the obvious connection between grooming – nails, hair, smell – and basic hygiene, this recommendation tells us much more. A physician’s hair, for instance, should not be too extravagant, nor his fragrance overly refined. In short, self-care should not become opulence. Their garment was expected to be sober, clean, and preferably white (Hipp. Test. A4).
By contrast, the charlatan was known for favoring lavish garments, elaborate wigs, and opulent perfumes. The “uniform” of the physician – an identity-marker so deeply felt that it is repeated across all the ethical treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus – thus becomes the first line of defense against false doctors, those who, lacking any training or experience, concealed themselves behind the luxury of their clothing and the affectation of their speech (on the false doctors: Boudon-Millot 2003; Samama 2004; Harris 2024).
We may therefore say that clothing made the physician in ancient Greece as well. Indeed, even more strongly, clothing was the essential distinction between the true physician and the charlatan, between the professional and the non-expert.
The ancient Greek medical “uniform” thus illuminates a tension that persists in modern healthcare: the need to visually differentiate expertise from fraud. Whether through the white coat, the stethoscope, or the EMT high-vis jacket, uniforms continue to function as symbols of trust, as objects that stabilize the fragile relation between patients and practitioners. Seeing this dynamic at work in ancient medicine does not simply enrich our understanding of the past; it reframes the emotional and ethical weight of contemporary medical attire. Clothing has always policed the boundary between healer and impostor. The Greek evidence shows that this boundary was never purely technical: it was embodied, aesthetic, and deeply human. Seen this way, ancient Greek medicine invites us to rethink professionalism not as a product of formal credentials alone, but as a more complex and nuanced practice of recognition: one grounded in appearance, trust, and the social visibility of expertise.
Works cited:
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Image: Physician treating a patient. Red-figure Attic aryballos, ca. 480–470 BC.
