Edward Jenner among patients in the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital at St. Pancras

Etched and hand-colored in the manner Gillray made his signature medium, this print lampoons public terror surrounding Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccination. At center, a physician inoculates a stout, frightened woman while the crowd around her erupts into grotesque chaos — figures sprout bovine heads and limbs from their bodies, a visual pun on the rural, animal origin of the vaccine. The class caricature is blunt: working and middling bodies are rendered lumpen and slack-jawed, their fear coded as ignorance. Gillray's distorted physiognomies, exaggerated postures, and dense crowd composition directly anticipate the visual grammar of sequential comics — the panel's frozen chaos demanding the eye read left to right through escalating reaction, exactly the storytelling logic William Hogarth pioneered and the comic strip would inherit.