Koedijck is believed to have been born in Amsterdam, and is documented as having lived alternatively in both that city and in Leyden until 1645. Documents of 1651 record him with his wife in Batavia awaiting passage with the Dutch East India Company to Agra where he was to serve as court painter to the Great Mogul Dschahangi. By the end of the year he had arrived in Surat, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, but was forced to give up the remainder of his trip. In September 1652 he was employed as a merchant by the company and acted in this capacity for more than four years before being discharged. After several years as a secretary with the Batavian government he was again employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1659 acting as a commander for the fleet returning to Holland. Upon his return he worked until the end of his life as a painter in both Haarlem and Amsterdam.

Peter Sutton suggests a date for the present picture in the late 1640s or in 1650 on the basis of both the figures' costumes and on its stylistic relationship to the artist's Empty Glass, dated 1648 (see Sutton, op. cit., p.218), and The Reveller, dated 1650, in the Hermitage (ibid., p.230).

Sutton discusses the intentions of many sixteenth and early seventeenth century artists in depicting doctors and barber-surgeons and draws attention to the different treatment which Koediick gives to this subject matter in the present picture. The lampooning of quacks and charlatans by Gerrit Dou and Adriaen Brouwer, amongst others, is here replaced by a respect for the work of the medical profession. An air of calm seriousness and humility shown in the poses of the doctor and his patient points to a conscious comparison with depictions of Christ washing the disciples' feet.

The belief that Koedijck was the forerunner of the Delft school as developed by Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer in the late 1650s and 1660s and was thus the link between this school and the earlier work of the Leyden artist Dou and of Rembrandt is analysed by Robinson. The care for detail and the carefully defined space employed by Koedijck in depicting interiors echoes the work of Dou and prompts a comparison with both that artist and with Rembrandt. Robinson shows the affinity between the staircase in Rembrandt's 1633 Scholar in his Study in the Louvre and the staircase in the present picture. A similar staircase also occurs in Koedijck's The Reveller of 1650 in the Hermitage; and he may have been inspired by that in Jan Vredeman de Vries' Perspectiva of 1604. By opening up the main space in the present picture with the inclusion of a girl at a half-opened window and a spiral staircase, Koedijck creates a powerful effect within a strict composition of straight lines, rectangles and squares which are arranged with a dramatic rush toward the vanishing point. As Robinson points out Koedijck's spatial experiments are important evidence of the attention these problems were being given in the forties and fifties which was to lead to the great achievements in Delft in the sixties.

The paraphernalia which furnishes the barber-surgeon's surgery consists of medical equipment and items which have less direct bearing on his work: thus, the table against the rear wall holds a globe and a violin and bow, indicating the doctor's wider intellectual interests. On the shelves above are bottles and phials containing drugs and powders, medical instruments together with a human skull and the skeleton of a small animal which may indicate an interest in comparative anatomy. Suspended from the enclosed gallery is a stuffed crocodile, perhaps analagous to the salamander which had special significance for alchemists. Above it, hanging from the wall of the gallery, is a crossbow: an outmoded weapon by the date of the present picture, it nonetheless had a significance as the weapon with which militia companies were sometimes armed. The inclusion of a barber-surgeon amongst the ranks of this local institution indicates the new status and respectability that members of the medical profession were beginning to enjoy in the late 1640s and 1650s