The Sick Woman

In the Dutch Republic of the 1660s a doctor read a patient mostly from the pulse and the urine, and some reached for folk methods as well. Jan Steen shows one of those at work. The old man bends to feel the young woman's pulse while she leans on a pillow and looks out at us, and the question in the room is whether she is lovesick or pregnant. In the lower left stands a small brazier. A strip of the patient's clothing would be left to smoulder in it, because the smell of burning cloth was thought to revive a woman who had fainted, and even to reveal whether she was expecting. Steen's viewers knew what to make of this doctor at once. His cap and small ruff were decades out of fashion, the costume of a figure of fun.