The bad doctors

It is 11.30 in the morning and the curtains reveal a scene of a bloodbath from a grotesque hospital pantomime or a tableau by Marquis de Sade. Against a garish turquoise backdrop, five delinquent doctors dance across a gruesome blood-stained stage. An accoucheur with a top hat and a syringe soaked in blood drags a tapeworm from the swollen, scarred abdomen of his unhappy and helpless patient, who screams out in pain and despair. The tapeworm's tail and a surgical instrument protrude from adjacent wounds, while flies buzz around the expelled intestines. A wild-eyed surgeon with a red beard and blood spatters swings the tapeworm's head onto a skewer and the two mad medics 'conga' at their tall colleague in a top hat, who is carrying an empty chamber pot dripping with blood, not knowing that behind him his fat, dark-haired assistant is busy stealing his wallet. The coils of the tapeworm entangle the doctors' legs and unravel over the blood-soaked floorboards. Death - a grinning, spiky-haired, scythe-bearing skeleton in a patched-up gown and worn, mismatched shoes - enters the stage left, while two decomposing corpses look on from the 'gods', firing a syringe of enema at the pot-waving doctor and pointing insultingly at the clock. Behind the gaudy orange duvet and the red couch, a fifth doctor with a moustache throws up his arms in horror. Beneath this macabre montage lies a collection of quasi-surgical tools (knives, saws, corkscrew) and some scattered clinical notes:

"Me suis trompé / Rien donner à P", "Reçu 1000 / Bon client / Traîner / Femme C crevée a 7 heures", "Expedier X / Rien recu / Attendre pour Z", "J'ai laissé l'éponge dans / le ventre / Péritonite se déclarera".

The artist's signature and the date are in the bottom left-hand corner. At the top left, a spider is quietly spinning its web.

The five doctors are Sacré, Croq, Rommelaere, Thiriar and Yseux, highly respected professors at the Faculty of Medicine of the Free University of Brussels [1]. Their attacker is James Sidney Edouard Ensor, the self-proclaimed visionary artist of Belgium. His motives remain unresolved, but he has also viciously attacked judges (The Wise Judges 1891), cooks (The Dangerous Cooks 1898), musicians (The Terrifying Musicians 1891) and even the Belgian royal family (Doctrinaire Nutrition 1889).