An Obese Gouty Man Drinking Punch with Two Companions

Three figures crowd a small table bearing a punch bowl. At left, a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man nurses his drink — the 'tisick' (consumption) personified. A low-cut woman raises a glass at center, embodying the colic. At right, a grotesquely fat, red-faced man swathed in bandages props his gouty foot on a stool while clutching his cup: the banner above reads Punch cures the Gout. The joke is delusional folk medicine. Gillray executed this as a hand-coloured etching, his preferred medium — acid-bitten lines, flat aquatint washes, vivid applied colour. His class caricature here is sharp but not his cruelest: the fat man reads as prosperous English bourgeois rather than a named political target. This tradition of sequential grotesque bodies — Hogarth's diseased rakes, Rowlandson's bloated squires — fed directly into the panel-by-panel visual comedy that would become the comic strip.