Nurses Have Always Used Ingenuity When It Comes to Personal Protective Equipment
This story is part of a series, Past/Present, highlighting images and articles from Vogue that have personal significance to our editors.
In a knee-length white dress and a geometric headpiece stamped with a big red cross, the nurse on the cover of a 1918 issue of Vogue doesn’t resemble the frontline responders we see every night on the news, but her mission was the same as theirs: saving lives.
The shortage of appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) has unexpectedly made medical apparel the subject of headlines. What is a new subject to the general public is an all too familiar one to many nurses and medical professionals who have had to resort to drastic, and often antiquated, means to ensure basic levels of protection. But this is hardly the first time in history nurses and other medical professionals have taken their safety into their own hands.
Modern nursing uniforms, as we know them, date to the Crimean War, and made the image of Florence Nightingale in a white dress, apron, and angular cap iconic. This uniform gave a visual identity to nurses (and women at large) and legitimized their integral role in war-time response.
Over the decades, however, nurses were forced to make practical changes to the standard dress code in response to the demands in the field. The scale of World War I brought nurses directly into the mud-filled trenches of Europe, and skirts and capes were shortened to accommodate their increased physical labor. Similarly, the white nurse’s dress, once a symbol of purity and sanitation (handily, it could also be bleached between uses), was changed to a darker shade of gray to conceal blood and mud. Pockets were added to many nursing uniforms during this time too as nurses required readier access to vital medical tools within the trenches.
The Spanish influenza, which ravaged the globe between 1918 and 1919, also changed how nurses dressed for self-protection. Recent discoveries in sanitation had led organizations like the American Red Cross to produce and distribute masks by the hundreds of thousands, but the disease spread so rapidly that there was a shortage in supply. An account from a hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, details nurses using makeshift masks made of five layers of gauze, wire, and a gravy strainer. And as for the Red Cross masks, they no doubt aided nurses considerably, but they did not come without their faults. In Chicago, nurses reported having to undergo tiresome sanitation practices in order to reuse them, including boiling and drying them multiple times a day. After the masks were laundered several times, they would be burned to risk further spread. This practice required additional labor for the already overworked nurses, and many would become ill regardless of the extensive measures.
Fast-forward 100 years: The headlines in newspapers from 2020 look an awful lot like those in 1918 publications. Once again nurses are using miscellaneous items—like trash bags or Yankees rain ponchos—for protection. This is a cycle that must be broken. We must take care of the medical professionals who take care of us.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
