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
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp scientist such as Dr. Tulp would not be involved in menial and bloody work like dissection, and such tasks would be left to others. It is for this reason that the picture shows no cutting instruments. Instead we see in the lower right corner an enormous open textbook on anatomy, possibly the 1543 "De humani corporis fabrica" ("Fabric of the Human Body") by Andreas Vesalius. The corpse is that of the criminal Aris Kindt (alias of Adriaan Adriaanszoon), who was convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed earlier on the same day of the