Visit to the Doctor

The doctor holds a glass flask up to the window light and studies what is inside. It is urine, and in 1668, when Hendrick Heerschop painted this panel, reading its colour and cloudiness was still one of the ways physicians judged a patient's illness. The patient is not in the room. The old woman at the doctor's side has brought the sample, as was common.

By then the practice was also a stock joke. Dutch painters and comic writers mocked the piskijker, the piss-gazer who claimed to read anything from a flask, pregnancy included. Heerschop signed and dated the picture on the page of a book at the bottom of the panel, HEERSCHOP, 1668. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V. When it was sold in Amsterdam in 1778 it had a companion piece, and both went to the same buyer, the dealer Pieter Fouquet.