Samuel Luke Fildes was an English genre painter and illustrator, generally known for paintings of Venetian life and his many portraits. The Doctor is notable for the year in which it was painted, 1890, the year in which Emil von Behring observed the existence of the curative properties in the serums of animals that had recovered from diphtheria. As Fildes showed in his painting, doctors were no better off in 1890 than was Aretaeus in the third century and for centuries before that: They could only sit and watch the child die.