The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospital
April 10, 2024 4:36 PM Subscribe
The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospitals, 1930. Just some wonderful illustrations of those things. via.
Everyone knows that Children’s Hospitals use red.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:35 PM on April 10 [8 favorites]
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:35 PM on April 10 [8 favorites]
Red does has more positive connotations than negative like the dorothyisunderwood said. Red is associated with more love, lust, passion than blood and death.
posted by one for the books at 11:23 PM on April 10
posted by one for the books at 11:23 PM on April 10
Red is best used in abstract swashes on the floors, leading from room to corridor for best effect. Color theory backs this up.
posted by maxwelton at 12:26 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 12:26 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]
Hospitals are green in theory.
The leading figure was Faber Birren, a former graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, who set up a highly influential and successful colour consulting business in New York City. His clients included the US Army and Navy, hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, General Motors and Dupont. From the 1930s to 1970s, Birren and his colleagues literally transformed and coloured the institutional and industrial landscape of North America. His motto was “putting color to work.”
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:30 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]
The leading figure was Faber Birren, a former graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, who set up a highly influential and successful colour consulting business in New York City. His clients included the US Army and Navy, hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, General Motors and Dupont. From the 1930s to 1970s, Birren and his colleagues literally transformed and coloured the institutional and industrial landscape of North America. His motto was “putting color to work.”
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:30 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]
A couple of centuries ago they started with white. When germ theory became accepted and understood, suddenly every place that needed to be kept clean was white washed. The British Army, notably, went really big on painting everything in sight white, and after getting their troops to paint the barracks and repaint them again, sometimes went completely mad and made them whitewash the parade square and the lower tree trunks of the trees alongside it. Dairies, slaughterhouses, torture chambers, nurseries and hospitals all went white.
Most readers here are probably too young to remember the relentlessly white nursery furniture and white baby shoes. Those were survivals that lingered into the 1980's. Our traditions of baby blue for boys and baby pink for girls was an outgrowth of the all white era, when you'd have a dozen babies in a nursery, every one of them dressed in well sanitized, boiled and sterilized white wrappings... and you'd have to unwrap and undress every one of 'em to figure out which one of your charges had the impetigo. After you put the boys into blue and the girls into pink you only had to undress half of them. It was a short step from there to having the layette include aqua and yellow, because then you could get started on your knitting and sewing before the baby was born when you didn't yet know what gender it would present as. With four or five pastel colour choices in a nursery, the attendant might only have to undress a quarter of the little baby bun loafs.
The thing is that white antiseptic hospitals naturally got some bad associations. Hospitals were where you went to die, or find out you were dying. Hospitals restricted visiting hours, so if your son got off work at two AM he couldn't tiptoe in and see you. Parents were instructed not to visit their children when they were in hospital because the poor little things became so distressed when visiting hours were over that they might wail until they vomited, and be up all night crying. And this of course wasn't good for sick children who needed to rest. Matron in her white apron and cap was a martinet, and the nurses who worked under her were required to live in residence, and frequently denied all opportunity to have a social life so that they couldn't escape. They were held to strict standards where they could be dismissed for having a stocking seam crooked. Women who were not in nursing shuddered at the idea of having to wear white stockings. Sometimes the only way out for a young nurse in those days was to marry a doctor, which led to a whole genre of doctor and nurse romance novels and considerable confusion in young patients who sometimes though the doctor on a ward was married to all the nurses that worked there, except Matron who was probably his mother.
Things were much better when hospitals were white than during the earlier era, of course, because they now had ether and surgery to go with all the white paint and the white uniforms, but you still really did not want to go to the hospital and find out what was wrong with you - a cancer diagnosis led to a choice between being sent home to die, or exploratory surgery where they rummaged around looking for visible tumours.
When they first brought colours into hospitals to brighten up the austere whiteness, the patients reacted really well. It was sooo much better than institutional white in an era when people covered their own walls with pretty patterned wall paper or painted them in colours. It was like being nursed at home, only with nurses that had the time to look after one properly unlike one's daughter in law who also had to look after four kids. There was an observable drop in pain perceived and an increase in speed in recovering, and the patients themselves said how much they loved it. The horrible ubiquitous whitewashed walls and cabinets had become fresh and springlike! You didn't need to paint everything white to ensure it was perfectly clean. It was wonderful for everybody.
Twenty years later, though, they had learned to loathe and dread that scrub suit green and scrub suit blue. The results were observable in their blood pressure which shot up in a green waiting room. You didn't actually end up seeing a vast array of colours with different hospitals choosing different shades. Probably it was more economical to stick to just green, and likely lesser quality hospitals imitated the colour choices of better ones. As a rule medical institutions almost always picked that muzzy scrub suit green. - And that colour was also the one being picked by many modern twentieth century navies, who painted every square inch of their battleships and cruisers in the same colour. People naturally soon associated murky green with surgeons who had no time to discuss their case with them, and long stays in the hospital while in traction not knowing if they would walk properly again, and grandmother dying, and the terrible diet of extremely cheap Australian mutton that they fed navy men on. Nurses, however, were on the bottom of the power structure still getting ordered around by any male medical student who didn't know which end of the thermometer was supposed to be stuck where, so they were still stuck still wearing the Victorian white uniforms and the nineteenth century parlour maid caps and being the subject of erotic domination fantasies.
Hospitals who wanted to improve their patient's survival rate took note of the many patients who gave themself up for lost in the grim green surroundings, and also the difficulty they had recruiting nurses, once young women from good families had more than the two original career options, (nurse or wife) and they eventually started allowing their nursing staff more liberties, and more practical uniforms than the classic white nursing one. Enter floor nurses allowed to wear scrub suits. At this point all the various hospital workers got redressed at their own expense from an array of pastel outfits available at the hospital uniform shop. They looked like spring flowers! It was an excellent efficient way to make it easy to tell exactly what everyone's job was. In one hospital the pediatric nurses might all dress in pink and the pediatric department be painted yellow, while the orderlies got to all wear yellow, and the surgical wards got painted pale peach. Food services might dress in apple green, and the wards, briefly, looked rather like the images depicted by the OP. It was a vast relief to everyone.
Until all those pastel colours began to get that spooky overtones of a deteriorating post war hospital, where the green and the peach and the yellow are chipped and smell of ether and DDT spray, and your grandmother told you she had been born there... but at least the nursing staff had long since won the right to choose their uniforms and switch jobs whenever they wanted, so apart from a few older nurses who still had the funny caps and dresses, they were now wearing colourful patterned scrubs. They went wild on patterns, starting in the pediatric department.
Pediatric nurses wore patterns first. In the beginning it was stethoscopes and bedpans printed on their scrub suit tops, to ensure that nobody thought they were unaccountably out of uniform. They had to begin with medical motifs to make sure the patients didn't think they had forgotten to change. Female veterinarians and staff were able to wear animal motifs, like printed cats and dogs patterns, because clearly no adult would wear that kind of print in any other context. It was a short step from there to having the pediatric nurses wearing kitties and puppies too, to the delight of their little patients, who were appallingly bored, the way you are during long sessions in the hospital, so easily delighted by anything that added a bit of colour and variety. And in a few more years the nurses could wear anything with a whimsical pattern in the pediatric department, so rain boots and umbrella print, or frogs and lily pads print, or Minnie Mouse print all got the approval.
Which brings us to today. The most recent trend I have noticed in hospital uniforms is black with clear department markings. Our local emergency room has gone with black track suits with ER in big letters squarely between their shoulder blades. What are the implications of this recent trend? Well, austerity and practicality is the first thing. But also the focus has moved from reassuring the patients that the hospital is a safe fun place to be, to making the emergency department personnel part of the team that includes the police and paramedics. Their uniform is suitable to being worn at a mass casually event. It's easy to imagine them working beside someone else in a similar uniform who is carrying an assault rifle and not tending patients.
I've yet to find out what the patients think of this swat team black being introduced - but then, in our local hospital at least, they are mainly sitting in a well packed waiting room, not knowing if they will ever be seen or not, overseen by a uniformed security guard who sits behind them, prepared to escort anyone out if they are deemed a risk to other people, and who will upon occasion escort late arriving family members inside the locked doors to the cubicle where their family member waits. It wouldn't be what I'd call reassuring, if I hadn't personally observed people who weren't even prospective patients trying to force their way in. Yes, those black uniforms are austere and practical. And they do seem to need the security.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:09 AM on April 11 [7 favorites]
Most readers here are probably too young to remember the relentlessly white nursery furniture and white baby shoes. Those were survivals that lingered into the 1980's. Our traditions of baby blue for boys and baby pink for girls was an outgrowth of the all white era, when you'd have a dozen babies in a nursery, every one of them dressed in well sanitized, boiled and sterilized white wrappings... and you'd have to unwrap and undress every one of 'em to figure out which one of your charges had the impetigo. After you put the boys into blue and the girls into pink you only had to undress half of them. It was a short step from there to having the layette include aqua and yellow, because then you could get started on your knitting and sewing before the baby was born when you didn't yet know what gender it would present as. With four or five pastel colour choices in a nursery, the attendant might only have to undress a quarter of the little baby bun loafs.
The thing is that white antiseptic hospitals naturally got some bad associations. Hospitals were where you went to die, or find out you were dying. Hospitals restricted visiting hours, so if your son got off work at two AM he couldn't tiptoe in and see you. Parents were instructed not to visit their children when they were in hospital because the poor little things became so distressed when visiting hours were over that they might wail until they vomited, and be up all night crying. And this of course wasn't good for sick children who needed to rest. Matron in her white apron and cap was a martinet, and the nurses who worked under her were required to live in residence, and frequently denied all opportunity to have a social life so that they couldn't escape. They were held to strict standards where they could be dismissed for having a stocking seam crooked. Women who were not in nursing shuddered at the idea of having to wear white stockings. Sometimes the only way out for a young nurse in those days was to marry a doctor, which led to a whole genre of doctor and nurse romance novels and considerable confusion in young patients who sometimes though the doctor on a ward was married to all the nurses that worked there, except Matron who was probably his mother.
Things were much better when hospitals were white than during the earlier era, of course, because they now had ether and surgery to go with all the white paint and the white uniforms, but you still really did not want to go to the hospital and find out what was wrong with you - a cancer diagnosis led to a choice between being sent home to die, or exploratory surgery where they rummaged around looking for visible tumours.
When they first brought colours into hospitals to brighten up the austere whiteness, the patients reacted really well. It was sooo much better than institutional white in an era when people covered their own walls with pretty patterned wall paper or painted them in colours. It was like being nursed at home, only with nurses that had the time to look after one properly unlike one's daughter in law who also had to look after four kids. There was an observable drop in pain perceived and an increase in speed in recovering, and the patients themselves said how much they loved it. The horrible ubiquitous whitewashed walls and cabinets had become fresh and springlike! You didn't need to paint everything white to ensure it was perfectly clean. It was wonderful for everybody.
Twenty years later, though, they had learned to loathe and dread that scrub suit green and scrub suit blue. The results were observable in their blood pressure which shot up in a green waiting room. You didn't actually end up seeing a vast array of colours with different hospitals choosing different shades. Probably it was more economical to stick to just green, and likely lesser quality hospitals imitated the colour choices of better ones. As a rule medical institutions almost always picked that muzzy scrub suit green. - And that colour was also the one being picked by many modern twentieth century navies, who painted every square inch of their battleships and cruisers in the same colour. People naturally soon associated murky green with surgeons who had no time to discuss their case with them, and long stays in the hospital while in traction not knowing if they would walk properly again, and grandmother dying, and the terrible diet of extremely cheap Australian mutton that they fed navy men on. Nurses, however, were on the bottom of the power structure still getting ordered around by any male medical student who didn't know which end of the thermometer was supposed to be stuck where, so they were still stuck still wearing the Victorian white uniforms and the nineteenth century parlour maid caps and being the subject of erotic domination fantasies.
Hospitals who wanted to improve their patient's survival rate took note of the many patients who gave themself up for lost in the grim green surroundings, and also the difficulty they had recruiting nurses, once young women from good families had more than the two original career options, (nurse or wife) and they eventually started allowing their nursing staff more liberties, and more practical uniforms than the classic white nursing one. Enter floor nurses allowed to wear scrub suits. At this point all the various hospital workers got redressed at their own expense from an array of pastel outfits available at the hospital uniform shop. They looked like spring flowers! It was an excellent efficient way to make it easy to tell exactly what everyone's job was. In one hospital the pediatric nurses might all dress in pink and the pediatric department be painted yellow, while the orderlies got to all wear yellow, and the surgical wards got painted pale peach. Food services might dress in apple green, and the wards, briefly, looked rather like the images depicted by the OP. It was a vast relief to everyone.
Until all those pastel colours began to get that spooky overtones of a deteriorating post war hospital, where the green and the peach and the yellow are chipped and smell of ether and DDT spray, and your grandmother told you she had been born there... but at least the nursing staff had long since won the right to choose their uniforms and switch jobs whenever they wanted, so apart from a few older nurses who still had the funny caps and dresses, they were now wearing colourful patterned scrubs. They went wild on patterns, starting in the pediatric department.
Pediatric nurses wore patterns first. In the beginning it was stethoscopes and bedpans printed on their scrub suit tops, to ensure that nobody thought they were unaccountably out of uniform. They had to begin with medical motifs to make sure the patients didn't think they had forgotten to change. Female veterinarians and staff were able to wear animal motifs, like printed cats and dogs patterns, because clearly no adult would wear that kind of print in any other context. It was a short step from there to having the pediatric nurses wearing kitties and puppies too, to the delight of their little patients, who were appallingly bored, the way you are during long sessions in the hospital, so easily delighted by anything that added a bit of colour and variety. And in a few more years the nurses could wear anything with a whimsical pattern in the pediatric department, so rain boots and umbrella print, or frogs and lily pads print, or Minnie Mouse print all got the approval.
Which brings us to today. The most recent trend I have noticed in hospital uniforms is black with clear department markings. Our local emergency room has gone with black track suits with ER in big letters squarely between their shoulder blades. What are the implications of this recent trend? Well, austerity and practicality is the first thing. But also the focus has moved from reassuring the patients that the hospital is a safe fun place to be, to making the emergency department personnel part of the team that includes the police and paramedics. Their uniform is suitable to being worn at a mass casually event. It's easy to imagine them working beside someone else in a similar uniform who is carrying an assault rifle and not tending patients.
I've yet to find out what the patients think of this swat team black being introduced - but then, in our local hospital at least, they are mainly sitting in a well packed waiting room, not knowing if they will ever be seen or not, overseen by a uniformed security guard who sits behind them, prepared to escort anyone out if they are deemed a risk to other people, and who will upon occasion escort late arriving family members inside the locked doors to the cubicle where their family member waits. It wouldn't be what I'd call reassuring, if I hadn't personally observed people who weren't even prospective patients trying to force their way in. Yes, those black uniforms are austere and practical. And they do seem to need the security.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:09 AM on April 11 [7 favorites]
Limewash- whitewash - is mildly antiseptic and antifungal, and reduces sunscald on trees. It wasn’t just a psychological choice.
posted by clew at 8:50 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
posted by clew at 8:50 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
Limewash- whitewash - is mildly antiseptic and antifungal, and reduces sunscald on trees. It wasn’t just a psychological choice.
Indeed. Lime was in major use as a disinfectant, especially in outhouses and charnal pits. The biggest problem is that you can't actually scrub limewash to remove splatter or soil as it comes off when you do, so you have to keep applying more and more coats of the stuff.
In the case of the British Military it has been suggested that it was easier to whitewash the various rocky outposts they were posted on than to keep cleaning off the bird droppings...
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:12 AM on April 11
Indeed. Lime was in major use as a disinfectant, especially in outhouses and charnal pits. The biggest problem is that you can't actually scrub limewash to remove splatter or soil as it comes off when you do, so you have to keep applying more and more coats of the stuff.
In the case of the British Military it has been suggested that it was easier to whitewash the various rocky outposts they were posted on than to keep cleaning off the bird droppings...
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:12 AM on April 11
??? If you don’t scrub dirty lime wash the next coat doesn’t stick. Even the dust of clean lime wash needs to be washed off. You scrub and then put on another coat of lime.
posted by clew at 11:19 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 11:19 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
→
That was probably a jankers punishment. Spike Milligan wrote of having to whitewash coal as jankers.
If this book was from the UK in the 1950s, maybe all of those colour ways were wild suggestions. Everything municipal was painted “that” shade of green: a green of etiolation and despair, a colour with all the life sucked out of it.
whitewash the parade square
That was probably a jankers punishment. Spike Milligan wrote of having to whitewash coal as jankers.
If this book was from the UK in the 1950s, maybe all of those colour ways were wild suggestions. Everything municipal was painted “that” shade of green: a green of etiolation and despair, a colour with all the life sucked out of it.
Frating Green (adj.)posted by scruss at 2:29 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]
The shade of green which is supposed to make you feel comfortable in hospitals, industrious in schools and uneasy in police stations
— Adams, D. and Lloyd, J.: The Meaning of Liff (1983)
??? If you don’t scrub dirty lime wash the next coat doesn’t stick. Even the dust of clean lime wash needs to be washed off. You scrub and then put on another coat of lime.
I think you missed the point - that walls in buildings like hospitals get dirty, and nobody wants to reconstruct them on a daily basis, any more than somone should repaint their wall every time their baby gets spaghetti-Os on it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:36 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
I think you missed the point - that walls in buildings like hospitals get dirty, and nobody wants to reconstruct them on a daily basis, any more than somone should repaint their wall every time their baby gets spaghetti-Os on it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:36 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
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