A Surgeon Examining a Patient's Mouth

This scene of a surgeon examining a patient's mouth from around 1644 continues Dou's extensive investigation of medical and quasi-medical subjects that formed one of the most characteristic strands of his production. The boundary between legitimate medicine and quackery was a subject of cultural anxiety in seventeenth-century Holland, and Dou's medical scenes navigated this ambiguity — presenting professional examination with enough precision to be documentary while including comic elements that acknowledged the genre's satirical dimension. The examination of the mouth combined medical observation with the physically intimate access to another person's body that made medical genre a subject of combined fascination and discomfort.

The intimate examination is depicted with the microscopic precision characteristic of Dou's work, the surgeon's hands and instruments rendered with the same care as the patient's anxious expression.