The painting shows the interior of a surgeon's house, with shelves in the right background holding vessels and instruments for use in surgery; other instruments, and a stringed instrument of the violin family, are suspended below the shelves. The surgeon, dressed in black, pours a liquid from a spoon into the wound in a man's shoulder. The patient, seated on a stool and with his feet on a footstool, expresses pain in several ways: he clasps his hands around his right shin, tenses the muscles around his mouth, frowns, and squeezes the sole of his left foot against the side of his right foot. On the right, the surgeon's apprentice prepares a plaster over a brazier. A painting with an almost identical composition, unsigned, is in the Musée du Louvre: the most obvious difference is that in the Louvre painting, the patient's stick, lying on the ground, runs from upper right to lower left, whereas in the Wellcome painting it runs from upper left to lower right.