The White Coat Ceremony is a moment of inspiration and a rite of passage for first-year medical students across the US and around the globe. The ceremony originated at the University of Chicago in 1989 when Norma Wagoner, PhD, then Pritzker’s dean of students, and Holly J. Humphrey, MD’83, MACP (1956–2025), then the program director of the University of Chicago Internal Medicine residency program and later Pritzker’s dean for medical education, envisioned a new tradition. Today, participants in the 1989 ceremony still recall the impact it had in the moment and over the course of their careers.
Wagoner conceived the ceremony as a way to help first-year medical students see themselves as physicians. She worked with Eugene Geppert, MD, who taught the Introduction to Medicine class for first-year students, where faculty physicians would bring a patient to class and engage with the students in an interview and dialogue. The white coat emphasized a student’s commitment to professionalism and patient care.
“Pritzker was engaged in making changes to the curriculum that involved a greater investment of time in early clinical introduction for entering medical students,” Wagoner recalled. “I wanted to set expectations for student behavior during important patient interactions. I asked Dr. Geppert to invest each student with their long white coat, upon which their name had been sewn.” Students were then expected to wear their white coats to class.
The meaning of the white coat
The white coat has been a symbol of medical authority and commitment to science since the 19th century. Before then, physicians were more commonly depicted in black, formal attire because medical visits were viewed as solemn, serious events. As medicine increasingly embraced laboratory science, antisepsis, and the hospital as a place of treatment, white came to represent cleanliness, scientific progress, professionalism, and trust.
For Humphrey, the symbolism of the white coat was much more personal. She later wrote about delivering the keynote address at the first White Coat Ceremony: “I remember sharing my earliest memories of the white coat—memories not from my years as a student or as a physician, but as a nine-year-old child when my younger sister was in a coma. For my family and me, the white coat was a symbol of hope. A symbol worn by the professionals on whose every word we clung as my sister struggled to live, and nearly died, with newly diagnosed diabetes.”
For students at the first ceremony, the coat represented the responsibility they were about to assume and made the transition into medicine feel tangible. “It wasn’t until years later that we understood what that first White Coat Ceremony represented,” said Michael Kipp, MD’93. “We didn’t just learn years of science and conduct research. We learned how to be service providers. We understood what a good interaction between a physician and a patient should look like because it was modeled for us in that class.”
The white coat symbolized that students would uphold Pritzker’s standards of clinical excellence. “I was part of a university with a vested interest in me, not just a relatively anonymous student trying to keep my head above water,” said David Litvak, MD’93. “I was a chosen ambassador.”
Carrying inspiration into a career in medicine
The White Coat Ceremony tradition that began at Pritzker emerged as a defining rite of passage across health professions. Today, a White Coat Ceremony or similar ritual takes place at a vast majority of US medical schools, medical schools abroad, more than 450 nursing schools, and physician assistant programs. Students join in a shared promise to carry the values of compassion, professionalism, curiosity, and service into the years ahead.
“If I could speak to my younger self on the day of my White Coat Ceremony, I would say, ‘Always place the patient at the center of your work, remain intellectually curious, embrace cross-disciplinary collaboration, and never stop learning.’ Those principles have guided my career in research, education, and mentorship,” said Tzung Hsiai, MD’93, PhD.