In the centre of the picture a physician or natural philosopher holds up a flask of urine which the woman standing nearby has brought to him in the wicker basket which she holds on her arm. In traditional western medicine, examination of urine was the commonest method of diagnosis. The painters Gerard Thomas (1663–1720) and Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715) continued at Antwerp the tradition popularised by David Teniers the younger (1610–1690), of showing chemists, apothecaries and physicians in the setting of a room designed as the museum or laboratory of a scholar. Their paintings show them as somewhat antiquated figures consulting huge folio-size Latin books of the ancient works of Galen or (less frequently) Hippocrates. Although such books were printed in the sixteenth century, none appear to have been printed in the southern Netherlands in the seventeenth century, though some were printed at Lyons.