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 an enormous amount of herbs and spices from the East, thanks to the new shipping routes. It became a successful trade and in 1636 there were 66 apothecaries in Amsterdam. Shocked at the exorbitant prices asked for useless anti-plague medicines (Amsterdam was severely hit by the plague in 1635), Dr Tulp decided to do something about it. He gathered his doctor and chemist friends together and they wrote the first pharmacopoeia of Amsterdam in 1636 the "Pharmacopoea Amstelredamensis". The Apothecary guild would require an exam based on Dr Tulp's book in order for new chemists to set up shop in