A Medical Procedure

This lithograph depicts a phrenologist or medical charlatan examining a patient's skull while the seated figure recoils in alarm. The exaggerated facial features and caricatured expressions—especially the patient's distorted visage—employ period conventions of physiognomic caricature to ridicule both the practitioner's pseudo-science and his subject. The print continues the tradition of social satire established by Hogarth and refined by Gillray and Rowlandson, using grotesque physiognomy as visual comedy. By the mid-nineteenth century, such prints mocked medical fraud and scientific pretense through deformed bodies and grotesque types. The lithographic technique allowed wide distribution of such satirical imagery, establishing visual conventions later adopted by newspaper comics and eventually the comic strip form itself.