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 of his books, Tulp became Mayor of Amsterdam in 1654, a position he held for four terms. His son Dirck married Anna Burgh, the daughter of Albert Burgh, another Mayor of Amsterdam who had, like Tulp, studied medicine in Leiden in 1614. In 1655 Tulp's daughter Margaretha married Jan Six, whom he helped become a Magistrate of family affairs in Amsterdam. Years later, Six would also become Mayor of Amsterdam. Tulp, impressed by his behaviour, invited Paulus Potter to come to Amsterdam, after a quarrel in the Hague. In 1673 Tulp was admitted to the Governing Committee of the Republic