Easing the Tooth-ach

A rotund, powdered-wigged tooth-drawer clamps both hands around the gaping mouth of a patient perched helplessly on a round stool, the patient's body contorted in comic agony. The caption beneath reads Easing the Tooth-ach — ironic relief, since the cure looks worse than the complaint. Gillray's caricature exaggerates both figures through distended jaws, bulging eyes, and grotesque physicality — the stock vocabulary of late-eighteenth-century English print satire that he, alongside Rowlandson and Hogarth before them, refined into a popular commercial art form. Hand-coloured etchings like this one were sold from print-shop windows to a broad public, making visual mockery of professional pretension and bodily humiliation democratically accessible. That tradition of sequential exaggeration and class comedy flows directly into the panel grids of the first comic strips a century later.