A Medical Practitioner Examining the Urine and Taking the Pulse of an Elderly Man

A Medical Practitioner Examining the Urine and Taking the Pulse of an Elderly Man, in the Wellcome Collection, is notable for featuring uroscopy — urine examination — alongside pulse-taking as a diagnostic procedure. Uroscopy, the examination of a patient's urine in a distinctive flask held up to the light, was one of the most visually recognisable emblems of early modern medicine and was depicted by Dutch and Flemish painters from the fifteenth century onward. By Steen's time the procedure had already attracted satirical treatment: the physician peering at a urine flask was an emblem of diagnostic pretension, since uroscopy could in fact reveal relatively little. The elderly male patient differed from Steen's typical young female patient, shifting the comedy from lovesickness to the generational theme of ageing and medical dependency. The Wellcome Collection's comprehensive Steen holdings make the full range of his medical subjects legible.

The uroscopy flask was one of the most recognisable objects in Dutch genre painting's visual vocabulary and required precise rendering of its distinctive tulip shape and amber contents. Steen placed the physician holding the flask against interior light in the conventional manner, allowing the transmitted colour to register. The elderly patient's posture conveyed the specific vulnerability of age and illness.