The Agnew Clinic exception of the patient. It largely repeats the subject of Eakins's earlier "The Gross Clinic" (1875), seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting echoes the subject and treatment of Rembrandt's famous "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" (1632) (in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands), and other earlier depictions of public surgery such as the frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius's "De humani corporis fabrica" (1543), the "Quack Physicians' Hall" ("c." 1730) by the Dutch artist Egbert van Heemskerck, and the fourth scene in William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty" (1751). Students of the medical class of
Nicolaes Tulp Surgeons. His wife died in the same year, leaving him with five young children. In 1630 he married his second wife, the daughter of the mayor of Outshoorn and she bore him three children. It was Dr Tulp who examined and signed the fitness reports for the first Dutch settlers on the island of Manhattan, and his signature was found on these in the long-lost archives of the Dutch settlement uncovered in the 1980s in the basement of the New York public library. In his job, Tulp was responsible for inspections of apothecary shops. Chemists in Amsterdam had access to