De vreedzame kopster (The Peaceful Barber)

This Dutch engraving satirizes a barber-surgeon performing bloodletting, a common medical practice of the era. A woman patient sits while the practitioner draws blood into a bowl; attendants prepare implements and collect specimens. The composition mocks both the procedure's questionable efficacy and the barber's pretensions to medical expertise. The print descends from Northern European satirical traditions that attacked quackery and incompetence through exaggerated scene-painting. Such images—combining text, caricatured figures, and symbolic props—established conventions that would flow through 18th-century prints by Hogarth and Gillray, into 19th-century popular graphics, and eventually into modern sequential art. Bloodletting persisted despite growing skepticism, making the barber-surgeon an enduring target of visual ridicule across generations.