Jenner and His Colleagues Rout the Anti-Vaccinators

Isaac Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching places Edward Jenner and two composed colleagues at right, holding vaccination lancets and pamphlets, while three grotesque opponents—bloated, wild-eyed, physically exaggerated through the era's stock vocabulary of moral deformity—stagger leftward past bodies strewn on the ground. Speech balloons overhead compress the period's vaccine debate into shouted slogans, a device Cruikshank shares with Gillray and Rowlandson and one that will migrate directly into the comic strip. The figures' distorted faces belong to a print-satire tradition stretching from Hogarth's moral series through the Strand caricature shops to Daumier's lithographic attacks on the French bourgeoisie: exaggerated physiognomy reads corruption or folly at a glance. That visual shorthand—legible moral coding through bodily distortion—is the precise grammar comic books would inherit a century later.