Tabitha Grunt; or, The Walking Hospital

A stooped, cane-clutching old gentleman—the bemused doctor—faces Tabitha Grunt, a grotesquely overdressed hypochondriac whose elaborate yellow skirts and towering hair ornament signal both vanity and absurdity. Bottles of physic crowd the table between them; a small dog sniffs at her feet. Cruikshank renders both figures with the rubber-faced exaggeration typical of the period: swollen noses, jutting chins, and pinched expressions that reduce human folly to caricature. The class comedy here targets the fashionable valetudinarian—a wealthy woman who converts imagined illness into social performance. Printed by etching and hand-coloured aquatint in the manner Gillray and Rowlandson had perfected, such single-sheet satires were sold from print-shop windows, their sequential visual logic and stock comic types feeding directly into the multi-panel strips that became the comic book.