Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Dutch nation became one of the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, employing its naval prowess to dominate international trade and create a vast colonial empire.
Beside trade, an early "industrial revolution" (powered by wind, water and peat), land reclamation from the sea, and agricultural revolution, helped the Dutch economy achieve the highest standard of living in Europe (and presumably the world) by the middle of the 17th century.
Medicinal practice during that time is very different from what they are today.
In the 17th century, Dutch medicine was based on classical medicine and philosophy, and was often based on the theories of Galen and Hippocrates.
Common medical practices include:
Bloodletting: Used to relieve fevers
Cucumber: Used to cure rashes
Wine: Used to aid digestion
And Medical theories include:
Illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm)
Medicines aimed to rebalance the humors or restart the flow
Foods could cause imbalance
Despite their high levels of education, physicians in the 17th and 18th centuries lacked practical experience. However little you know about the history of medicine, you’re probably aware that doctors used to prescribe some pretty strange courses of treatment. For centuries they were famously reliant on bleeding, a remedy based on the ancient idea that some illnesses were caused by an excess of blood. Leeches, widely used for hundreds of years, removed only a teaspoonful of blood per application, but physicians sometimes took more drastic measures. By opening a vein (usually in the arm) they could remove several pints at a time if they thought it necessary. If you were lucky enough to escape a thorough bleeding, taking medicine often wasn’t much fun either. Commonly prescribed drugs included highly toxic compounds of mercury and arsenic, while naturally-occurring poisons such as hemlock and deadly nightshade were also staples of the medicine cabinet.
One 17th-century Dutch physician, IJsbrand van Diemerbroeck, proposed an unusual treatment for nosebleeds – he suggested that they could be prevented by filling your nose with hog or donkey dung. Born in 1609, IJsbrand van Diemerbroeck became famous for his Treatise on the Plague, first published in 1646, in which he presented an eye-witness account of the pestilence epidemic which struck the Dutch city of Nijmegen during the years 1635-1637. This epidemic was one of the worst and longest-lasting in the whole of Dutch history, taking the lives of over 6.000 people, more or less half of the population of Nijmegen at the time. In his treatise, Van Diemerbroeck described 120 of his patients into very precise detail, proposing various treatments while critizing the medical malpractice of others. The high quality of his research ensured that Van Diemerbroeck’s treatise remained a fundamental and indispensible study well into the nineteenth century. It is still highly acclaimed by students of medical history today.
So, plenty of weird and wonderful medicinal stuff and ideas during the 17th century. The apothecaries were even more fascinating, in addition to all the plants, herbs and minerals, they also used animal parts, including meats, fats, and skins, both for internal and external use, and even ingredients like urine, fecal matter, earwax, human fat, and saliva, which are now considered ineffective or unsanitary. The more gruesome details include mummies and other preserved and fresh human remains being a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts. Egyptian mummy, was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. Skull was another common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments.
On this day of the Venice Carnevale, my Italian friends Agostino and Lucca came dressed as 17th Century Dutch doctors.
The Venice Carnevale is not solely about masks. Local Italians prefer historical costumes or painted faces. During Carnevale, the whole Venice becomes a real life theatrical stage, and many of these historical costumes carry deep perspectives...
The portraits are done using natural lighting only and inspiration comes from those 17th century Dutch portraits with an element of "Temporality". Dutch portraits sometimes depict their subjects awkwardly hunched or bent over, many in the process of rising from a chair. These appear to contradict the upright posture and graceful movement promoted by early modern conduct books. They may be understood, however, in light of the pressures to more precisely measure time that were being promoted in commercial circles and the debates concerning the nature of time raging in academic ones. But instead of awkwardness or lack of social grace, seventeenth-century viewers are supposedly experiencing the momentary quality of these portraits as intensifying the presence of the portrayed, thus reducing the psychological barrier created by the painted portrait as a physical object.
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