A Cholera Patient Experimenting with Remedies

A gaunt, wild-eyed figure — rendered in the exaggerated physiognomy typical of Regency caricature, his rags and vacant stare coding him as working-class poor — hunches over a table labelled Board of Health, clutching a tub of Blue Pills while an Emetic bottle looms beside him. Beneath the table sprawls a skeleton inscribed Fee Fo Fum; his bench reads Starvation. The cartoon skewers official cholera remedies as useless against a crisis rooted in poverty — medicine as farce, bureaucracy as accomplice. Robert Cruikshank, brother of George, worked squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of hand-coloured satirical etchings: single-image moral argument, speech labels, grotesque bodies. That tradition — image plus text, sequential moral logic — fed directly into the illustrated comic strips of the 1840s onward.