The Dying Patient, or Doctor's Last Fee

A woman collapses against a weeping attendant on a disheveled bed; a second figure cradles her head while bottles and a basin litter the floor. Two physicians—powdered wigs, fine coats, the unmistakable costume of prosperous professional men—turn toward the door. Their expressions mix theatrical grief with frank calculation: the fee dies with the patient. Rowlandson's aquatint line is loose and physical, flesh rendered with the same comic exaggeration he would later bring to his Tours of Dr. Syntax. The caption's blunt double meaning—last fee—typifies Georgian print satire's class bite: doctors were nouveaux-riche tradesmen dressed as gentlemen, and the joke skewers their mercenary detachment. This tradition of sequential moral commentary, sold cheaply from London print-shop windows, fed directly into the illustrated comic strip.