Nicolaes Tulp attended by prominent learned men, who exchanged ideas about anatomy and the chemical processes of the human body. As befits a new praelector, the Guild commissioned a new group portrait of the prominent councilmen and guildmasters. Rembrandt, himself a young man of 26 and new to the city, won this commission and made a famous painting of him: "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp". This painting, which now hangs in the Mauritshuis museum of the Hague, depicts Tulp dissecting such a criminal's forearm. There has been much speculation as to why the dissection began on the forearm. Rembrandt's event
Nicolaes Tulp but also because of the fantastic stories that he relates. An example; Jan de Doot, a blacksmith in Amsterdam, was in such pain from a bladder stone, that he sharpened a knife and removed it himself, because he refused to be the victim of the 'stone cutters'. These were the barber-surgeons who performed such procedures but had a high death rate. To everyone's surprise, Jan de Doot survived this operation which was said to produce a stone the size of an egg. A painting illustrating this story is in the collection of the Anatomy Museum of Leiden. Tulp minutely described