The Cow Pox Tragedy — Scene the Last

A chaotic theatrical stage packed with grotesque figures enacts Cruikshank's assault on Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine and the Royal College of Physicians who endorsed it. A radiant cow-herd boy at centre is flanked by banners reading Common Sense, Truth, and Religion, while a procession of physicians, quacks, and bewildered patients — class-coded from ragged poor to powdered gentry — streams across the foreground. Allegorical figures crowd the wings; medical authority is rendered as pompous farce. The hand-colouring and dense speech-bubble rhetoric are hallmarks of Regency print-shop satire — the tradition running from Hogarth's moral series through Gillray's vicious caricatures — work sold cheaply in shop windows that trained popular audiences to read sequential visual narrative, a direct ancestor of the comic strip's page grammar.