Interior with doctor, assistant, old woman and girl. Oil painting by Egbert van Heemskerck.

  • Heemskerck, Egbert van, 1634 or 1635-1704.
Reference:
44706i
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Selected images from this work

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About this work

Description

In this painting an old woman has brought for examination the urine of the weeping young woman in the background: the implication is that she is pregnant, and that the man examining the urine is a urine-scryer who can detect pregnancy by "seeing" in the urine a foetus or some other sign not visible to ordinary people. The words "water-caster" and "water-doctor", Dutch "pis-besiender", were applied to such figures. However, from the customer's point of view there was no clear boundary between that kind of urine-examination and the kind practised by physicians

Physical description

1 painting : oil on canvas ; canvas 34.2 x 43.7 cm

Related material

Select images of this work were taken by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum: WT/D/1/20/1/65/79

References note

Christopher Wright et al., British and Irish paintings in public collections, New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006, p. 408

Reference

Wellcome Collection 44706i

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