A Doctor Prescribing Continuation of Treatment to His Reluctant Patient

Thomas Rowlandson's coloured etching shows two corpulent figures: a ruddy, white-wigged physician clutching a vial, and a bloated, bandana-wrapped patient slumped in a chair, his swollen belly straining his waistcoat. Speech bubbles — a device Rowlandson used decades before comics formalized it — carry the doctor's breezy prescription of 'eight more draughts' against the patient's grumbling about his insides resembling 'a Apothecary's Shop.' Shelves behind them are crowded with remedies labeled 'Water Gruel' and 'Pills for the Stomach,' satirizing a medical profession whose cures often rivaled the illness in misery. Both figures are rendered as grotesque physical types, the class caricature standard to Georgian print culture: the fee-hungry doctor, the self-indulgent wealthy patient. Rowlandson's fluid, comic line — descended from Hogarth's moral sequences and feeding directly into the visual grammar of the comic strip — made his work a formal bridge between eighteenth-century satirical printmaking and the sequential art traditions that followed.