Giving Up the Ghost, or One Too Many

A bloated, wig-wearing physician slumps asleep beside his patient's deathbed while the corpse lies rigid beneath a sheet. At the broken window, a skeletal Death peers in triumphantly; at the door, a top-hatted undertaker's man arrives with a coffin — his services apparently anticipated. The hand-coloured etching works in the Rowlandson vein: loose, fluid line, exaggerated bulk, red-nosed incompetence presented as comic type. The physician is class caricature aimed at Georgian medical men widely suspected of hastening death through negligence or quackery — a recurring anxiety in an era before licensing reform. This tradition of sequential moral exposure, running from Hogarth's Industry and Idleness through Gillray's political plates to Daumier's lithographed bourgeois, taught European and American cartoonists the vocabulary — exaggerated physiognomy, visual irony, captioned punchline — that passed directly into the comic strip.