A Dress Code, Please!

On a recent Sunday I saw one of my saner colleagues making hospital rounds dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. While in these permissive and anything-goes times I should not have been startled (and dismayed) but I was. Casualness has its limits and I always thought there was a clear distinction between the place of work and a Sunday afternoon stroll through the park.

It took me a while to get used to the society norms when I arrived in Toledo almost 40 years ago to the month. On that first day I was invited to a party in one of the apartments on the hospital campus. I appeared dressed in a three-piece suit thinking of a hot cup of tea and a piece of cake. Instead, I entered a noisy and raucous pizza and beer party where young residents and nurses were having a merry good time dancing to the tunes of Monkeys and the Beetles. For a moment I thought I had entered the kingdom of Sodom and Gomorra. But the shock of young women wearing Bermuda shorts wore off in time and from our present vantage point that wildness was sedate and placid indeed.

Since then I have been witness to the slow erosion of dress code in our society. Bermuda shorts that so startled me are now replaced with plunging neck-lines that merge with ascending hemlines and in the process bare various anatomic assets along with a few shiny body rings. Or a dude showing his biceps and pectorals and other attributes through a breezy tank top and a Speedo.

But those spectacles are usually seen on the outside, the rarefied confines of professional places of work. There has to be some distinction between the street and the work place. As my fellow Blade columnist Rose Russell lamented in one of her fine pieces last year the casual wear has become so common that dress-down days occur almost every day.

Professionals - physicians, lawyers, business people and the like - used to conform to a workplace dress code that included jacket and necktie for men and business attire for women. While the latter two professions still adhere to that time honored tradition, the medicos are slipping. Slowly but surely they are trading their white coat, tie and jacket to casual wear. Now if you enter any hospital the chances are the man dressed in blue denim jeans with frayed cuffs, tennis shoes and a wrinkled shirt could be a surgeon or anesthesiologist rather than a visitor. I can’t imagine a lawyer appearing before a judge in a similar outfit to plead a case. (Though truth be known I have seen one local judge who leaves a lot to be desired the way he presents himself on the bench.)

When I was a resident in surgery training there was an unwritten rule, strictly enforced by the chief, that everyone on the service had to wear a clean shirt (not necessarily pressed) and a necktie. Violators were asked, not too politely I must add, to leave the hospital and return only when they were properly dressed. Dr. Marion Anderson the late chief of surgery (and also one time president) at Medical College of

Ohio, had a simple explanation. It was a privilege to take care of patients and with that privilege came the responsibility to present oneself properly. I also know of a well-known surgeon at the old Mercy Hospital who was asked to leave the hospital by the nun-administrator when the gregarious surgeon appeared in tennis outfit to make rounds.

Now I am not pleading a return to the stuffy and starchy days of the past where every public appearance would dictate a pressed suit, necktie and a button down shirt. I did that faithfully to the point where a colleague of mine once remarked that if I were Adam in the Garden of Eden I would be sporting a button down fig leaf. Alas age has a way of changing one’s perspective and I have over the years become a bit lax by abandoning the tie and jacket for my weekend rounds.

But I still cannot bring myself to appear on the bedside of my patients wearing my squash outfit or a tank top.