#teniers

removed skin growths, let blood, administered purges and even amputated limbs. He also served as the village barber.

Teniers responded to the widespread prejudice against these pseudo-scientists by producing numerous pictures of quack doctors who study flasks of urine or operate on a gullible victim's head, foot or back.

In the Museum's painting, a barber-surgeon tends to a patient's back, possibly preparing to lance a boil. At right the surgeon's young apprentice bends over a dish of glowing coals, warming a mustard plaster that will be applied to the wound.

In the background an older assistant readies another patient for the doctor. The patient's rolled up sleeves suggest that he will be bled.

On the stool nearby is the barber-surgeon's shaving basin, which possibly doubled as a bleeding bowl.

Arrayed in the foreground in jugs and bottles, the doctor's various potions and medications compost a flawlessly executed still life.

The primitive hocus-pocus of the barber-surgeon depended heavily on the pseudo-science of alchemy. In the painting both the fish skeleton and the globe suspended from the ceiling are alchemical images, and they point to the doctor's ignorant reliance on the debased, false science of alchemy.