My memory occasionally swings back to early adolescence when, for two weeks in the late 1930s, I was a patient at the old St. John of God Hospital in Boston. I came to that institution with the mumps and, while there, caught scarlet fever. It was an ordeal to have felt sick enough with the first disease and to have my hospital stay extended by catching another.

Lying in bed during those long days, I would frequently fix my eyes on young women in starched white, well-fitted dresses, along with shoes and stockings of the same color. The caps pinned on their heads indicated the schools where they had studied and a black stripe would show that they had received their RN.

These were the nurses who took care of me and the other patients in that now gone hospital.

Dressed in those crisp white uniforms, they walked smartly into my line of vision often in the course of the day. Their figures, shaped in part by their costume, fascinated me, a boy of no sexual experience at all, but one ready to become interested. My gaze would remain fixated on these young women, and intimations of erotic desire stirred in me obscurely.

At that time I would have been ashamed of my own body, dressed in a johnny as I must have been. Almost surely I felt mixed, both embarrassed and excited, about inspection by these beautiful creatures whom I was busy ogling.

“The color white did not become popular until the early twentieth century, following the new findings about germs and their role in spreading infection,” reports John Seabrook in a 2002 New Yorker article about nurses’ attire. Many people besides me still associate the nursing profession with white uniforms, even though these have gradually been abolished since the 1960s.

As the same author explains, “Feminists began to read its whiteness as a sign not of power but of diminishment.”  It had become “a symbol of the angelic, demure, dependent woman, not of the tough, resourceful professional she really is.”

I contrast that scene from my teenage years with those I have recently witnessed as a hospital patient in late life. Now each female nurse is likely to dress in her own way. They come to work outfitted for convenience rather than in clothes designed to express their profession. Their outfits range from slacks and blouses to other forms of everyday wear.

The closest hospital nurses come to a uniform now is “scrubs,” which became popular in the 1980s. But so many other staff members also wear them, technicians and orderlies for example, that these loose fitting shirts and pants, often of a dark green, do not distinguish nurses.

Though the distinctive uniforms once worn by female nurses have vanished, fortunately the dedication and commitment of the profession has not. Nurses still bring both skill and compassion to their work as they have done traditionally. As in the case of  nuns, giving up uniforms has done nothing to lessen their high standards.

I have had recent occasion to admire nurses for their service to patients. Some of the tasks that have become routine for them used to be reserved for doctors, so their responsibilities have widened. They frequently work long shifts and show themselves remarkably patient with the likes of me, a person who can be rather ornery and complaining on occasion.

Though I have sometimes chafed at hospitals, especially for their bad food (or, more precisely, food badly presented) and little regard for patients’ need for sleep, I  never find fault with the care nurses provide. They go far to make us associate the medical profession with personal caring.

Just as I welcome the presence of so many women among the ranks of doctors ─ and count several among my regular health care providers ─ so I feel glad for the freedoms that female nurses have gained over the last few decades. They show themselves much freer to express their individual personality than in the past and that can be good for patients.

Though my focus here has been primarily on nurses who work in hospitals, I also admire those who visit patients at home. There, too, these women usually dress as they wish, rather than in uniform, something that suggests their independence and maturity. However, it is their skill and compassion for their patients that most commend them to me. I have felt privileged to receive care from them during periods of convalescence.

It would be foolish nostalgia for anyone to want the white uniforms brought back just for old time’s sake. However, some nurses and others do regret the loss of distinctive clothing. They would welcome, not the starched uniforms of the past, but rather some way of indicating that nurses are highly skilled professionals who have their own standards and traditions.

Richard Griffin