Cutting the Stone

Cutting the Stone, also called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly, is an oil-on-panel painting completed c.1494 or later by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

The painting depicts a surgeon, wearing a funnel hat, removing the stone of madness from a patient's head by trepanation. An assistant, a monk bearing a tankard, stands nearby. Playing on the double-meaning of the word kei (stone or bulb), the stone appears as a flower bulb, while another flower rests on the table. A woman with a book balanced on her head looks on. The inscription in gold-coloured Gothic script reads:

"(Middle Dutch): Meester snyt die keye ras Myne name Is lubbert Das

(English): Master, cut the stone out, fast. My name is Lubbert Das."

Lubbert Das was a comical (foolish) character in Dutch literature.

Interpretations
It is possible that the flower hints that the doctor is a charlatan as does the funnel hat. The woman balancing a book on her head is thought by Skemer to be a satire of the Flemish custom of wearing amulets made out of books and scripture, a pictogram for the word phylactery. Otherwise, she is thought to depict folly.

Michel Foucault, in his 1961 book History of Madness, says "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."