A Physician Taking a Young Woman's Pulse

A Physician Taking a Young Woman's Pulse, in the Wellcome Collection, is almost certainly a version of Steen's lovesick maiden type — one of the most repeated and varied subjects in his entire output. The young woman whose pulse is taken by a physician who fails (or pretends not to notice) that her condition is romantic rather than medical was a subject Steen treated with unfailing inventiveness across multiple compositions. Each version introduced variants in the cast of characters, the setting, or the comedic details while maintaining the central ironic situation. The Wellcome Collection's acquisition of multiple versions of this subject reflects the institutional interest in the work as documentation of historical attitudes toward female health, emotion, and medical authority. In each iteration, the young woman's expressed condition — flush, averted eyes, sighing posture — was legible to every viewer as emotion rather than fever.

Each version of this subject required Steen to find fresh compositional approaches to the same basic situation, varying the cast, lighting, setting, or the precise gesture of the pulse-taking to distinguish it from previous treatments. The young woman's portrait-quality rendering was typically more careful than the doctor's more satirically handled face.