A Medical Practitioner Taking a Lady's Pulse

A Medical Practitioner Taking a Lady's Pulse, in the Wellcome Collection, is one of several pulse-taking medical scenes by Jan Steen in that collection — works acquired precisely for their relevance to the history of medicine as understood through art. Steen painted the act of pulse-taking with a consistent satirical awareness of the gap between the physician's diagnostic ceremony and the actual, often obvious, cause of his patient's condition. In the lovesick-maiden context, pulse-taking was the professional theatre through which a doctor performed authority over a condition anyone else in the room could diagnose by observation. When the patient was a lady rather than a young woman, the social dynamics shifted slightly: the age and status of the figure changed the comedy's register without eliminating Steen's characteristic irony. The Wellcome Collection's multiple Steen acquisitions on medical themes reflect the institutional interest in art as a source for understanding historical medical practice.

Steen's handling of the physician-patient encounter centred on the spatial and social relationship between the two figures: the doctor leaning toward his patient, wrist clasped, expressing professional attention; the patient receiving this attention with varying degrees of acquiescence, irony, or distress. Warm interior light created the intimate atmosphere appropriate to a domestic medical visit.