The Doctor

Dou dated this panel 1653 and signed it GDOV in the middle of the stone ledge. At an arched window a doctor raises a glass flask of urine to the light, the way physicians of his day read a patient's illness. In Leiden, a university town known for its medical teaching, examining urine was still accepted learned practice. The Kunsthistorisches Museum sees a double edge here all the same. The method was respectable, yet the doctor's showy way of presenting himself casts him as a charlatan, a man performing his learning as much as using it. The panel reached Vienna in 1772 from Pressburg, today's Bratislava.