Why do doctors in operating rooms wear green coats instead of white coats?

Yesterday, when I was surfing the Internet out of boredom, I saw another confusing question:

In everyone's subconscious mind, doctors seem to wear white coats, but after he asked this question, they changed their minds and realized that not all doctors wear white coats.

So why are there doctors in green? What do they do?

In fact, before modern medicine was established, doctors' clothes were not green, not even white. The clothes at that time were probably like this:

By the way, don’t think that this bird-beak shaped mask is a bit scary. It is actually the ancestor of today’s anti-epidemic masks. At that time, the bird-beak mask was used to prevent the Black Death (plague) that was raging in Europe.

So people in the Middle Ages knew that they had to wear masks. If you go out, remember to wear a mask!

Well, having said that, a big part of the reason why doctors at that time dressed like that was because the concepts of microbiology and disinfection had not yet been established at that time. Therefore, in order to avoid their clothes being stained by blood and becoming too conspicuous, doctors chose dark-colored clothes.

Later, with the advancement of medical conditions and the popularization of disinfection awareness, doctors began to realize that if the body is covered with blood, dust or other things, it is unhygienic and the clothes need to be washed and disinfected in time .

Therefore, in the late 19th century, British doctor Joseph Lister began to promote the use of white coats, because wearing white clothes can quickly detect blood stains on the body, reminding doctors to change and disinfect in time.

From then on, the white coat became a synonym for doctors.

As late as World War I, many battlefield doctors reported a problem to their superiors: when they were performing long operations, if they turned their sight from the crimson blood to the white doctor's uniform, they would experience temporary blindness, unable to see clearly or even unable to see anything , which led to many surgical accidents.

Later, after research, it was discovered that this was caused by "complementary color afterimage".

To put it simply, this phenomenon means that when the human eye stares at a color for a long time, the optic nerve is easily stimulated and fatigued. At this time, if you look somewhere else, in order to reduce this fatigue, our body will automatically use complementary colors as an adjustment to relieve fatigue .

For example, if we look at a bright red table printed on white paper for a long time.

At this time, you suddenly turn to a blank piece of paper, and you will find that an imprint of the form appears on the white paper, and this imprint will appear light green.

This is because the complementary color of red is green.

Similarly, when a doctor is concentrating on performing surgery in the operating room, all he sees is bright red blood.

When the operation lasts for a long time, and the doctor's eyes occasionally shift to other doctors' white coats, he will see spots of blood.

This will cause visual confusion and affect the effectiveness of the surgery.

In order to reduce the visual disturbance caused by "complementary color afterimage" to doctors, and at the same time alleviate doctors' attention fatigue to red.

Surgical gowns have been changed from white to green or blue (blue is also a complementary color to red), and even the walls of the operating rooms are mostly light green or blue.

This can effectively reduce the adverse effects of visual complementarity and make the operation go more smoothly, especially when the operation time is relatively long.

So later, blue-green clothing became the standard clothing for medical staff in operating rooms of various hospitals.