Patients Consulting an Obese Quack

Rowlandson's aquatint—a tonal intaglio process that mimics wash drawing—places an enormous, self-satisfied quack doctor at center, gesturing smugly toward a skeletal patient clutching a teacup while gaunt, bandaged figures crowd behind him. A skeleton hangs in the background, the satirist's blunt reminder of where bad medicine leads. The caption reads Wonderfully Mended / Shouldn't have known you again!! The corpulent physician's bulk against his wasted clientele is the joke's engine. The fat professional exploiting the desperate poor was a stock Rowlandson target; his class contempt operated in both directions. This sheet descends directly from Hogarth's sequential moral prints and feeds forward into Gillray's grotesques, the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets, and eventually the exaggerated character types that populate early comic strips and superhero comics alike.