Promotion médicale

This engraving depicts a crowded plaza dominated by a grand neoclassical church, its facade filled with arched windows and a tall spire. Masses of figures—patients, physicians, and onlookers—flood the foreground and balconies, while skeletal Death presides over the scene. The print satirizes the medical profession during the Revolutionary era, when physicians' authority and methods faced public skepticism. The dense composition and theatrical staging recall the tradition of Hogarth and Gillray, using architectural grandeur ironically to mock professional hubris. Through caricature and crowd scenes, the artist exposes medicine as spectacle and commerce—a critique extended throughout 18th-century print satire, which fed directly into modern comics' visual language of exaggeration, narrative panels, and social commentary.