DECATUR - It was once an iconic symbol.

Upon graduation from nursing school, a newly minted nurse would receive her cap as a symbol of her success and entrance into the profession of nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale.

The cap was fashioned to look like a nun's habit; nuns were the first nurses, and the calling to be a nurse was once closely tied to the church and Jesus' admonition to nurse the sick from Matthew 25. It was meant to keep the nurse's hair neat and out of the way, because all nurses were women for many years. The white uniform signified purity and cleanliness.

In most American hospitals today, you'd be hard-pressed to find even one nurse wearing a cap or a white uniform.

Mary Blankenship, nursing program director at Richland Community College, said caps are just not very practical.

"I started in nursing in 1978, and even at that time, we wore white when we graduated, and we wore caps," she said. "In (intensive care units), it was difficult to wear a hat, and at that time we were also wearing dresses and not pants. To wear that where you're having to run a lot, those hats would fall off."

A cursory search on the Internet for nurse's caps for sale turned up several sites that also offered bobby pins suitable for securing the caps, which aren't shaped to stay on without some assistance.

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