Rheumatoid arthritis-like deformities in an early 16th-century painting of the Flemish-Dutch school

Abstract

Hand deformities resembling those of rheumatoid arthritis have been depicted in a painting by an anonymous artist of the Flemish-Dutch School, mid-15th to early 16th century. The painting is presently in the Escorial Museum near Madrid, Spain. This observation, like other earlier observations of rheumatoid deformities in paintings of the Middle Ages, suggests that rheumatoid arthritis is not a modern disease; it had, indeed, appeared several centuries before Landré-Beauvais' description in 1800.