An operator making an incision behind the ear of a seated patient, two assistants restraining the patient, and six other people in the room. Oil painting attributed to Joachim van den Heuvel, 163-.

The figure-types, very similar to those of Pieter Quast (1606-1647), are combined in a virtuoso composition. The surgeon wears the flamboyant costume of the itinerant operators who worked out of doors, but here seems to be working in his own surgery. The contrast might be explained by a passage in Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters": "A quacksalver ... All the diseases ever sinne brought upon man, doth he pretend to bee curer of; when the truth is, his maine cunning, is corne-cutting. ... He parts stakes with some apothecary, in the suburbes at whose house hee lies: and though he be never so familiar with his wife; the apothecary dares not (for the richest horne in 's shoppe) displease him. All the midwives in the towne are his intelligencers; but nurses and yong merchants wives that (would faine conceive with childe) these are his idolaters. Hee is a more unjust bone-setter, then a dice-maker; he hath put out more eyes then the smal pox; made more deafe then the cataracts of Nilus; lamed more than the gout: shrunke more sinewes, then one that makes bow strings, and kild more idly, then tobacco. A magistrate that had any way so noble a spirit as but to love a good horse wel, would not suffer him to be a farrier. His discourse is vomit, and his ignorance, the strongest purgation in the world: to one that would be speedily cured, he hath more delaies and doubles then a hare, or a law suit: hee seekes to set us at variance with nature, and rather then wee shall want diseases, hee'le beget them. His especiall practise (as I said afore) is upon women; labors to make their mindes sicke, ere their bodies feele it, and then there's work for the dog-leach. Lastly he is such a juggler with urinals, so dangerously unskilfull, that if ever the city will have recourse to him for diseases that neede purgation, let them imploy him in scouring Moore-ditch." ("Sir Thomas Overbury his wife. With additions of new characters", London 1615)

On the banner on the right are depicted calculi, stones extracted from the body. They are bladder stones, but the implication is that the operator can extract "pierres de tête" from the head

[between 1630 and 1639?]

1 painting : oil on wood ; wood 41.5 x 56 cm

Attributed to Joachim van den Heuvel by Mr Fred G. Meijer, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, 3 September 1999. In 1635 Van den Heuvel presented a painting of "a doctor visited by all kinds of sick people" to the hospital of St. Job, Utrecht. The following year he died of the plague at Utrecht and was interred on 28 August 1636

Wellcome Collection 46023i