MedicalPhilately.com

   Faint from fever, the young woman rests her head on a pillow. Is she perhaps lovesick? Is she pregnant? To find out, a quack would put a strip of his patient’s clothing in a brazier to smoulder – the scent would disclose her secret. Jan Steen here presents such a charlatan making a diagnosis. His old-fashioned attire characterizes him as a comic character.

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  The theme of lovesickness was extremely popular in both painting and the theatre in the seventeenth century. Suppressed desire led to a vague syndrome known as ‘hysteria’. The satire is played out with the arrival of the doctor.

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  Jan Steen is known for his humorous depictions of the everyday life of farmers and the middle-classes in 17th-century Holland. His genre paintings as a rule had a strong moralistic meaning, some of them even examples of Old Dutch proverbs.