A doctor is delighted at confronting a full-blown case of cholera. Coloured lithograph by Cham, c. 1845.

From the series Turlupinades — French for buffooneries — this hand-coloured lithograph by Amédée de Noé, who signed himself Cham, shows a top-hatted physician gripping the wrist of a bedridden patient with undisguised glee. The caption has him crow that everyone calls it a trifling cholerine, a little nothing — parbleu, it is true cholera, the real cholera: a magnificent case. The doctor's exaggerated grin and the patient's hollow stare do the satirical work cleanly. The target is medical vanity: the clinician who prizes the interesting specimen over the suffering man. Cham was a direct inheritor of Daumier's lithographic social comedy, and Turlupinades belongs to the French illustrated-press tradition — Le Charivari, La Caricature — that trained European readers to read sequential image-and-caption humour, the immediate ancestor of the comic strip.