Intrusion, or the Doctor Disturb'd

A hand-coloured etching — the cross-hatched lines and bitten plate typical of late-eighteenth-century London print-shops — shows three figures in a domestic interior crammed with apothecary shelves. A portly physician in red coat sits beside a fashionably dressed woman on a settee, his posture suggesting interrupted intimacy; a third figure bursts in from the left, hat in hand, mouth agape. The caption reads Intrusion or the Doctor Disturb'd. The scene sits squarely in the Rowlandson tradition: the medical profession skewered for lechery rather than incompetence, the female patient rendered as complicit rather than victim — a class and gender assumption typical of the period's comic prints. Published at Piccadilly in 1786, it belongs to the London satirical print trade that ran from Hogarth through Gillray and Rowlandson, whose sequential narrative energy and typed social figures fed directly into the nineteenth-century comic strip.