Witches disguised as ordinary physicists (27th dream )

Preparatory drawing for the etching of Caprice no. 40, Of What Evil Will He Die? However, it should be pointed out that Goya modified many aspects of the drawing for the engraving. The sketch shows a donkey acting as a doctor and taking the pulse of a sick man, who is less well-defined in the drawing than in the engraving. Behind the donkey is another donkey with a wig and vaulting hair, reading some notes in a notebook. Between the two donkeys is the head of a woman, perhaps the patient's mother, who appears to be a child, whereas in the print it is an adult man.

Enrique Lafuente Ferrari believes that the woman in the drawing could be the Duchess of Alba and the patient the Duke. The Aragonese painter is thus denouncing the death of the aristocrat due to the ineffectiveness of the doctors who treated him. It has even been suggested that the artist was denouncing, albeit indirectly, the treatments he himself underwent during his illness, from which he recovered between 1792 and 1793 at the home of his friend Sebastián Martínez y Pérez (1747-1800) and which left him with permanent and profound deafness.