Jefferson Medical College class of 2007 white coat keynote address.

Abstract

Dr. James Studdiford's keynote address was delivered August 8, 2003, as part of the ninth White Coat Ceremony at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. The ceremony, designed as part of opening exercises for matriculating medical students, welcomes students into the professional family of medicine. Following Dr. Studdiford's comments, family and faculty circulated among the class and helped the students put on their new white coats. No student put on her/his own white coat. It is a moment to be shared with the loved ones and faculty who will support and shepherd students through the adventure of medical training, training replete with the triumphs and challenges, as Dr. Studdiford describes. A powerful piece of the ceremony occurs after the coating, when students join a legacy dating to the fifth century BC by reciting the Oath of Hippocrates. The original Hippocratic Oath charged physicians with the weighty responsibility of selecting worthy individuals for training in the art of medicine. Candidates for medical training were to be individuals with characters marked by moral discipline, reverence for life, and a capacity for commitment to the core Hippocratic values: beneficence, honesty, respect for the doctor‐patient relationship, and protection of the privacy of the details of individuals' lives and ills. Students of medicine were required to so commit themselves before they could commence medical training. In a return to Hippocratic tradition, the White Coat Ceremony represents a welcome as well as a shared covenant to a unifying professionalism in medicine. With the challenges to professionalism detailed by Dr. Studdiford, the White Coat Ceremony reminds aspiring and practicing physicians of the heritage that is ours to protect.—Mitchell J.M. Cohen, MD, the Pain Medicine Program and the Department of Undergraduate Medical Education, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA