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This 16th century painting by Hieronymous Bosch depicts a quack surgeon plucking the "stone of folly" from a fools's head while a monk assists and a nun looks on vacantly. The surgeon's funnel is symbolic of fraud, his jug a symbol of Satan. Bosch was satirizing the ignorance of his day, when surgeons commonly deluded patients into believing such stones caused madness.

The pitcher in the monk's left hand presumably contains some manner of inebriant, being employed here as an anesthetic. One can hope that this scene might serve as a reminder to the patterns community not to fall prey to the sorts of hype, hucksterism, and charlatanism that have afflicted other emerging disciplines as they've found their ways into the limelight.


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From The Mind, by John Rowan Wilson, Time Inc., 1964

Brian Foote foote@cs.uiuc.edu
Last Modified: 25 May 1996