The Gout

A bare foot, grotesquely swollen, lies propped on crumpled bedding while a fork-tailed demon bites and claws at the inflamed joint — the pain of gout made literal flesh. The etched line is coarse and energetic, exaggerating the bloated toe with the same grotesque inflation Gillray applied to politicians and royals. Gout in the period carried class meaning: it was the rich man's disease, consequence of port wine and excess, so the sufferer is implicitly a figure of overindulgence rather than sympathy. This sheet sits squarely in the London print-shop tradition — Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank — where a single vivid image sold cheaply and circulated widely, the direct ancestor of the sequential panel cartoon and, eventually, the comic book page.