In this picture, a doctor dressed in outmoded attire has been summoned to diagnose a young woman's mysterious malady. As in other works by Steen, such as The Doctor's Visit (c.1663), the woman suffers from lovesickness. This affliction is alluded to by the statuette of Cupid over the doorway, the bedwarmer and basket at lower left, the open bed, and, most explicitly, by the pair of dogs copulating in the foyer.
Though the meaning of the work is obvious, Steen probably intended some viewers (or the first owner of the picture, with whom the matter may have been discussed) to appreciate the resemblance between the lovesick maiden and Albrecht Dürer's famous personification of Melencholia (1514). That the painter is referring to the print is suggested not only by the woman's pose and expression, but also by his inclusion of a Cupid and a sleeping dog.
As many of Steen's contemporaries would have realized, the lady's distress is a form of melancholy induced by an imbalance of the four humors. Erotic melancholy was detected by feeling the pulse, which revealed the state of the heart, while uroscopy (the visual examination of urine) was employed to discover the same disorder or detect pregnancy. Though urinalysis was practiced by respected physicians in the 17th century, quack doctors used flasks of urine like crystal balls. In this work, the bottle in the lidded basket must be intended for a urine specimen. Music was considered beneficial for the treatment of melancholy, and it is probably for this reason that Steen included a nude male figure playing a violin—undoubtedly Apollo—in the area of tapestry (now abraded) immediately above the doctor. Thus Cupid and Apollo form a discordant chorus in the background, in a decorative mode of commentary typical of Steen.
The subject, which Steen depicted at least nineteen times, might be considered a Leiden specialty: Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris, and Gabriël Metsu are among the other local artists who depicted quack doctors attending dispirited women in paintings dating from the mid-1650s through the 1660s. Steen's treatment of the theme falls within the same period. Artists from other cities, such as Samuel van Hoogstraten, Michiel van Musscher, and Jacob Ochtervelt, also addressed the subject, which had been featured on the comic stage for well over a century. The popularity of doctors as figures of amusement, however, must also reflect the prominence of the medical faculty at Leiden University, where doctors from all over the Netherlands as well as from other countries received their training.
