The Physician's Visit

The Physician's Visit (c. 1660–1662) is an oil-on-canvas genre painting by the Dutch artist Jan Steen, now seen in the Apsley House collection in London.

Women in paintings such as this and The Lovesick Maiden are usually young, pretty and well dressed, while being positioned upward in a chair.

[1] The woman sitting down on the right is suffering from illness, which during the time was not only hard to identify, but also extremely difficult to treat.

Paintings consistently represent women in a fragile, passive, housebound way which was much more of a male wish, rather than a female reality.

[2] The paintings typically represent the practice of medicine by using a formulaic combination of characters and props: a distressed woman, a chair, a pan of urine, and a doctor's assistant.