Patients Consulting an Obese Quack

Rowlandson's watercolor—later etched for wide circulation—shows a corpulent, wig-wearing physician confronting a queue of visibly wretched patients in a cramped consulting room. A skeletal anatomical figure grins from the wall; a bedridden woman slumps forgotten in the background. The central patient's neck is grotesquely distended as the doctor prods it with theatrical self-satisfaction. The class dynamics are explicit: the physician's bulk signals his prosperity at the expense of the gaunt poor he is meant to serve. Rowlandson deploys the exaggerated physiognomy—bulging eyes, slack jaws, pendulous flesh—inherited from Hogarth and refined by Gillray, a visual grammar of moral critique that would pass directly into the sequential comic strip and, eventually, the comic book's tradition of social grotesque.