'Woman Being Bled' depicts the shop of a barber-surgeon, with the barber-surgeon himself letting blood from the arm of a seated woman in the foreground. A small boy stands in front of her, catching in a bowl the blood spurting from her forearm. To the left, another woman appears to hide her face in a shawl, perhaps in distress at the scene. To the right, other people are going about the business of the day: one man appears to be having his head shaved, while another is having his feet treated.

Before the professionalisation of medicine from the early 1800s, practical surgical tasks were usually undertaken by barber-surgeons, not by physicians. Bleeding was a common treatment in the practice of 'humoral medicine', which was how the workings of the human body were then understood in Europe and the Western World.