Taking Physic

A nightcapped invalid in a yellow dressing gown winces violently as he raises a tiny medicine cup to his lips, one hand gripping a folded paper — presumably a prescription — at his side. A table behind him holds a labeled packet, the whole scene set in a shabby domestic interior. The subject is universal comic humiliation: the gentleman undone by his own body. Isaac Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching after Gillray belongs to the great British print-satire tradition — Hogarth's sequential moral scenes, Gillray's grotesque exaggeration of physiognomy, Rowlandson's ribald middle-class embarrassments — in which the single-image comic print trained audiences to read exaggerated expression and visual punchline simultaneously. That visual grammar of compressed narrative and bodily comedy passed directly into the newspaper strip and, eventually, the comic book.