Quote:
Originally Posted by btns
Thank you. I have been searching the internet and found plenty of military(!) pictures for these lion-head cloak clasps. All are WWI Canadian nurses.
A general search shows that these clasps were used by police forces from the Victorian period onwards. May I now assume that the Canadian Nurse's cape origins is a Police cape?
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I would think that highly unlikely. Nurses uniforms (generically nurses and not just military nursing uniforms) evolved from the roots of nursing. Nuns (where do you think the title of "sister" came from) were among the first organized nursing groups and there is probably some influence there. You could throw in some influence from Florence Nightingale and what her women wore as well as the evolution of nurses' working clothing that included cloaks as an outer garment (also a common outer garment for women in general in the 1800s and early 1900s) that continued up to more recent times (see Call the Midwife). The origin may be as simple as "nurses wore cloaks/capes, so the CAMC nurses' uniform should include a cape".