Breathing a Vein

A sickly, bandaged patient — rendered with the exaggerated, drooping physiognomy typical of Georgian caricature's class mockery of the ailing poor — sits on a stool while a wide-eyed surgeon squeezes his arm over a bleeding bowl. The etching's burlesque of phlebotomy, then a routine and often dangerous medical fashion, reads as satire aimed at the medical profession's self-importance as much as the patient's credulity. Hand-coloured aquatint work gives the flesh tones their queasy warmth. Gillray's original line — the godfather of British political caricature — fed directly into Rowlandson's comic narratives and, through cheap printed sheets, into the sequential panel storytelling that would eventually become the comic strip and comic book.