Britannia between Death and the Doctors

James Gillray's hand-coloured etching shows Britannia—a composed woman in yellow, Union shield at her side—besieged in her sickbed by warring physicians. One doctor triumphantly boots a rival through the door while grinding a third beneath his heel; Death lurks at the curtain's edge, gleeful and skeletal. The caption reads "Death may decide, when Doctors disagree." The "doctors" are politicians: the scene lampoons the exclusion of Charles James Fox from William Pitt's ministry, medicine serving as a long-established metaphor for governance. Gillray's etching technique—acid-bitten cross-hatching, vivid hand-applied washes—descends directly from Hogarth's moral series and feeds forward into Rowlandson and eventually the newspaper strip: sequential, exaggerated, physically cruel, unmistakably comic.