Weird character and friend of artists such as Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, who were often his guests, Dr. Gachet had a strong influence on Van Gogh. He was a physician specialized in nervous diseases and an expert of alternative therapies such as physiotherapy, metallotherapy, and especially homeopathy, which was taking its first steps at the time. Gachet examined Van Gogh and found that he was a very peculiar patient and had been diagnosed with epileptic seizures and heart and intestinal disorders, almost certainly due to his bad eating habits as well as his disorderly life, which had led him to suffer from a kind of “pica”, an eating disorder leading to ingest non-edible foods, including tube colors, or drink the turpentine he used to dilute the colors. All of this, together with the large amounts of absinthe, his favorite liquor that he used to drink on evenings spent in bistros, surely led to an impairment of his clinical and mental state. Gachet diagnosed him with a sort of manic-depressive psychosis and recommended him a kind of ahead of its time art-therapy, thank to which Van Gogh immersed himself in work. Followed by Dr. Gachet, he also initiated him into etching. The portrait of Dr. Gachet with his pipe is the only example left. Despite some improvements shown, the therapy implemented by Dr. Gachet was not enough to prevent the fatal crisis that led Van Gogh to kill himself in a fit of self-destructive madness.