Lijf- en levensbehoud op het Schouwtoneel des Doods

Salomon van Rusting was a medical doctor from Amsterdam who lived and worked around the early 1700s. He wrote one of the few Dutch Death Dances, naming it ‘Het Schouw-Tooneel des Doods’. A Death Dance was an artistic expression of human death popular in the Late Middle Ages. The traditional Death Dance invited acknowledgement of the vanity of worldly existence (‘memento mori’) by portraying human subjects’ encounters with ‘Death’. This paper describes the context in which Van Rusting’s work arose and briefly characterizes its highly original and, for the most part, rather burlesque nature. In contrast to other Death Dances, Van Rusting’s work does not represent medicine as being powerless in the face of death. His work strikes us as having almost modern confidence in our own ability to avoid an untimely death by living sensibly.

Conflict of interest: none declared. Financial support: this study was made possible partly by a grant from the Vereniging Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (Association Dutch Journal of Medicine).