Hendrik van den Burgh worked in The Hague. Like many European painters of his time he had a close attachment to Dutch paintings of the Golden Age – the seventeenth century – which he used as the model for the settings in his work. The stillness of the spacious room in a surgeon-apothecary's house is disturbed by the reaction of the patient to the pain of the operation: as the operator digs into the gum, the patient kicks out and sends his own basket of eggs across the floor. A dog barks at the disturbance. The painting is recorded as having been auctioned in Amsterdam in 1817.