The Doctor's Examination

Here the warning has come too late. A young woman sobs while a quack holds up a flask of her urine. The Dutch had a blunt name for such a man, a piskijker, a piss-looker, and in the flask he claims to see a tiny baby swimming, proof that she is pregnant. The man on the left is angry. The boy on the right laughs at the whole painful scene and, looking straight out at us, makes an obscene gesture.

Judging illness by the look of a patient's urine had been ordinary medical practice for centuries, and Dutch painters had long turned the urine-gazing doctor into a stock comic figure. This panel is the sequel to A Useless Moral Lesson, in which an old woman warns a girl about love, and Schalcken signed both at the lower left.