 The motif of quacks was a common feature of Flemish and Dutch genre painting from the 16th century onwards.In the 16th-century Jan Sanders van Hemessen's had depicted a quack surgeon pretending to remove with a knife from a patient's open skull the so-called 'stone of madness'.Seventeenth-century genre painting regularly returned to the theme as can be seen in the works of Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Steen and David Teniers the Younger.