Anti-Vaccination Satire

This etching attacks Edward Jenner's newly introduced smallpox vaccination through grotesque imagery: a monstrous creature ingests baskets of infants and expels them transformed, sprouting horns and bovine features. The print literalizes anti-vaccination fears that the cowpox vaccine would transmute children into animals. Such visceral, scatological satire typified early-19th-century print polemic, inheriting techniques from Hogarth and Gillray's caricature tradition. The image reveals genuine public anxiety about medical innovation while employing dehumanizing imagery toward the vulnerable. This tradition of visual propaganda—combining crude anatomy, moral panic, and grotesque exaggeration—directly informed later political cartooning and the visual rhetoric of comics.