A Doctor Examining Patients for Suspected Toadstool Poisoning

Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching crams four grotesquely exaggerated figures into a sickroom: a corpulent patient in striped nightclothes and red cap gapes open-mouthed while a bespectacled physician leans in, a gaunt military man peers from behind, and a second elderly figure grimaces at centre. The satire is aimed squarely at the bodies of the wealthy — their gout-swollen excess, their hypochondria, their dependence on quacks. Rowlandson renders flesh as comedy: jowls cascade, noses hook, eyes bulge. Class contempt and body mockery work together, as they routinely did in Georgian print shops. This tradition of sequential visual comedy — Hogarth's moral series, Gillray's political savagery, Rowlandson's bodily farce — fed directly into the panel-by-panel storytelling grammar that comic strips and comic books would later inherit.