A surgery where all fantasy and follies are purged and good qualities are prescribed. Line engraving by M. Greuter, c. 1600.

Reference:
15851i
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Description

The shelves in the surgery are full of bottles labelled: "modestie", "honnestete", humilite", "obeissance" etc., and many more 'good ' qualities. A practitioner pours a liquid entitled: "sagesse" into the mouth of a patient who sits on a commode excreting fools. The other practitioner holds another patient on a wooden stretcher while his head is placed in a furnace from which all follies, vices and fantasies are being expelled

Physical description

1 print : line engraving

Contributors

Lettering

Le medicin guarissant phantasie. Purgeant aussi par drogues la folie. ... MG. Lettering continues: "Aprochez vous qu'auez la teste pleine, de chuntasie, qui vous met un grande peine, asseurez vous de ce maistre s̨cuant, quil voz humeurs seicherat tellemant, dedans ce four, qu'aurez en peu de temps, grand'allegeance de beaucop de torments, aussi serez purgè per ses breuvages, qu'incontinant deuiendrez du tout sages."

Notes

For another version of this print with more extensive lettering see Wellcome Library catalogue number 18173i

References note

Eugen Holländer, Die Karikatur and Satire in der Medizin, Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1921, pp. 200-211 (on this design and several other prints with the same theme)
Denis Ribouillault, 'Regurgitating Nature: on a celebrated anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder', Journal of historians of Netherlandish art, Winter 2016, 8(1), DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.1.4

Reference

Wellcome Collection 15851i

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