The Doctor by Gerard Dou | Book Excerpt
A fascinating book by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) The evolution of urine analysis : an historical sketch of the clinical examination of urine: lecture memoranda, American Medical Association, Los Angeles, 1911
I reproduce here an excerpt from the Chapter V Uroscopy in Art:
”It was doubtless owing to the fact that uroscopy was so common a feature in everyday life that we find its practitioners so frequently depicted by famous artists from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.
The physician, in the act of examining the urine, is depicted in many manuscripts, dating as far back as the early fourteenth century, and the subject becomes still more common among the wood- featured cuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from which period it became a popular subject among artists of repute. Pictures representing the physician, the apothecary or the charlatan in the act of diagnosing the disease of a patient from his urine glass are apparently innumerable.
[…]
Gerard Dow (1613-1675), who ranks among the finest painters of the Dutch School, surpasses even his famous contemporaries in his partiality for the physician with the urine glass as a model for his pictures. His famous picture called ' The Gerard Doctor " is well - known from the original, which hangs in the Imperial Collection at Vienna, and the many reproductions made from it. The physician is represented as a young man with fair curly hair, wearing a velvet cap and garbed in a long brown robe, belted round the waist. He stands in the full light of an arched window, holding the urinal upraised in his left hand, while he makes an explanatory gesture with the right. Behind him stands an old woman, apparently in trouble, who is weeping and drying her eyes. On the window-ledge a richly-coloured cloth falls on a bas-relief representing the passions, and on it rests a barber's dish of copper, an ornamental bottle, an open book bearing an anatomical drawing and the name of Andre Vesale.”
