Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)
Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts - Guide to the Exhibition
gary), and of Countess Mária Széchy. The painting was probably made by his brother János Spielenberg. 4. Pictures of surgery and medicine The religious wars of the reformation put new themes about the life on battlefields and in camps, onto the agenda of painters. An unknown Netherlander artist made the Ambulance Station in a Camp oil-painting on a hexagonal coppcr plate. The painting presents the 1621-1639 Spanish-Holland War. If we compare the illustrations of the contemporary surgery tract, (placed beneath the picture), which arc about the application of surgical instruments and techniques for removing bullets from human body, to the picture we can find the Netherlander artist's impression fairly accurate. A similar theme has been visualized by a 18th century German painter in The Wounded Cavalry Officer, a small size oil painting. As a logical consequence of the new attitudes of the Renaissance the depiction of daily life of common people became a popular subject for painters. The greatest home of genre paintings was indeed Holland, a classical territory of civic life. This school flourished especially in Rembrandt's time. Quite often in the pictures of Flamand and Dutch painters we can meet the studies of physicians, laboratories of pharmacologists or the operation theatres of surgeons. During the 17th and 18th centuries the newly developed methods of medicine, like urinalysis and sphygmoscopy, also appeared in these paintings. This scenes arc often visualized in exotic or mythological forms. The picture that shows Achilles while curing Tclephos with the iron filings of his lance was made by an unknown painter. It is a good representation of a 17th-century surgical treatment for wound dressing. The coloured draft of an Italian artist from the 18th century is about sphygmoscopy : Eristratos examining the melancholic Antoichos' pulse. The visit of the doctors was another usual topic of the painters. Occasionally you can even meet with the humour of Netherlander artists: sometimes the patient happens to be a young lady who has but love sick. Still, even these paintings illustrate contemporary medical practice, consequently, they are good sources for the medical historian. Jacob Toorenvliet's (1635/36—1719) painting falls into this category. A young lady is examined by a doctor who holds a urinalysing tube towards the light, while counting the pulse of his patient. (From the collection of the Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.) The German Johann Christian Fiedler's (1697-1765) Examination is a similar oil-painting made on a copperplate in rococo style. A young lady sitting in a velvet armchair looking into the doctor's face in need of help, who holds a urinalysing tube in his left hand and examines her pulse with his right. 42
