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

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