A Medical Practitioner Examining the Urine of a Sick Woman

This medical scene from around 1644 depicting a practitioner examining a sick woman's urine belongs to Dou's popular series of doctor's visit paintings. These works functioned simultaneously as entertaining genre scenes and as images of professional consultation that resonated with Dutch bourgeois anxieties about illness and the body. The uroscopy subject — examining urine in a glass flask held to the light — was a standard diagnostic procedure in seventeenth-century medicine and a recognized pictorial type. Dou's version brings his fijnschilder virtuosity to the glass flask in particular, demonstrating his mastery of transparent and translucent surfaces that was among his most praised technical achievements.

The composition arranges multiple figures around the central diagnostic act, with careful attention to the translucent urine flask and the anxious expressions of the participants, all rendered in Dou's characteristically refined technique.