The anatomy lesson of Dr Tulp - De anatomische les van Dr Nicolaes Tulp

I wrote this ages ago but for some reason never published it.   But here it is!

This painting by Rembrandt is in the Mauritshuis in Den Haag.  Last year on holiday I visited the gallery to see The Girl with the Pearl Earring (who in Dutch is just "The girl with the pearl", although it doesn't rhyme in Dutch), but De anatomische les van Dr Nicolaes Tulp is there too.  

This was Rembrandt's first commission on moving to Amsterdam, commissioned by the Surgeon's Guild.

Tulp gave annual anatomy lectures, open to the public (on payment).    The paper being held by one of the surgeons present at one point had the names of the sitters on it, now painted out.    I wonder who he is, and what the paper is (or is it a book - I had wondered, with no evidence, if it was an anatomy atlas, and the man holding it was comparing it with the dissection, or guiding it?).   Perhaps we can see that man as a prototype health librarian, there in the background of a procedure or intervention.  Perhaps he even was the guild's librarian, but that may be going a fanciful step too far!

As the information from the Mauritshuis points out, Tulp looks like he is seated on a throne, and is also the only one present who is wearing a hat, although originally one of the others wore one, till Rembrandt painted it out.  The man who had the hat painted out is Frans van Loenen, who is the man in the top left who is looking at us and pointing at the corpse (thanks to the Leiden site for that information).    If he had a hat it would have made a certain symmetry, but if, as the Mauritshuis site wonders, Tulp asked for his hat to be painted out because it would have given him more importance than he was due.

The name of the man whose body is being dissected is known, Adriaen Adriaensz, also known as Aris Kindt.   There is more about him if you scroll down on the Mauritshuis link.

The frontispiece of Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica has on it a dissected arm - and perhaps that is why Tulp wanted to be shown dissecting an arm.

A PubMed search for tulp n[ps] finds 36 (the same number of results as in September 2022).   (tulp AND (nicolaas OR nicolaes)) OR tulp n[ps] finds 51 (again the same).      There are two possible spellings of Dr Tulp's first name.

There are two papers by FF IJpma, one in English, one in Dutch, which are in those 51.  The English language one was republished as the Dutch one, and the paper(s) tried to replicate what Tulp was doing, in a dissection, and couldn't.   That author does have two capitals at the start of their first name, as IJ is one letter.

One paper in the results (Masquelet, 2005) makes the case that Tulp is demonstrating the function of the flexor digitorum superficialis.  Another (and only one) names a Tulp Syndrome.  

Nicolaes Tulp published a book, Observationes medicae, available online via the Wellcome Library.  This is free to access in the UK.

There is more information about the painting from the Mauritshuis, in Nederlands and the Mauritshuis, in English

and, because Tulp trained in Leiden, on the website of the Universiteit te Leiden, in Nederlands and the University of Leiden, in English