The Gout

A grotesquely swollen foot rests on a cushion while a winged black demon — all claws, teeth, and curling tail — bites and tears at the inflamed joint. The caption reads simply The Gout. Gillray's original 1799 etching, here reissued in 1835, belongs to the British print-satire tradition that ran from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson's bodily comedy: suffering rendered as grotesque spectacle, the invisible made viscerally visible. Gout was a class-marked disease, associated with wealthy men who drank port and ate rich food, so the image carries social sting beneath its medical humor. This tradition of sequential exaggeration and demonic personification fed directly into the visual grammar that would shape the comic strip — the single frozen panel that tells an entire story through one impossible, perfect distortion.