Edward Jenner among patients in the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital

Gillray's hand-coloured etching stages a chaotic surgery where a physician — identified with Jenner's cowpox vaccine program — inoculates a large, alarmed woman while surrounding patients sprout miniature cattle from their skin: arms, faces, buttocks. The grotesque transformations mock public panic that Jenner's bovine-derived vaccine would corrupt human flesh with animal matter. The figures are drawn with the lumpen, rubbery distortion Gillray perfected: class anxiety written onto bodies, the poor and middling sorts rendered coarser than their doctor. Etching's bitten line gave caricaturists exactly this speed and venom. Gillray's prints, alongside Rowlandson's, established the visual grammar — sequential crowd scenes, speech implied by gesture, panel-like compression of action — that fed directly into the nineteenth-century illustrated comic press and eventually the comic strip.