A Tooth-Drawer at Work

This colored etching depicts a quack dentist terrorizing his patient with a hot coal—a sadistic trick to extract a tooth through violent reflex. The figure on the left menaces his writhing victim with crude implements and flame. The print belongs to the 18th-century tradition of surgical satire popularized by Hogarth and Gillray, ridiculing medical charlatans and bodily indignity. Such prints offered common people comic revenge on authority figures through grotesque distortion and physical comedy. This tradition of political and social satire through exaggerated portraiture would directly inform the sequential storytelling and character types central to modern comics.