A Surgeon Bleeding a Young Woman

A coloured etching — acid-bitten lines washed in period watercolour tints — shows a fashionably dressed young woman submitting to phlebotomy, her arm extended toward a composed male surgeon who applies a lancet or fleam. A second woman in a voluminous yellow gown leans close, offering comfort or curiosity. The scene satirises the Georgian vogue for bloodletting as polite medicine and the social theatre surrounding it: illness as occasion for intimacy, the surgeon as drawing-room performer. Rowlandson's line is fluid and gently ribald rather than savage, typical of his work alongside Gillray in the great British print-shop tradition — single-sheet etchings sold by Ackermann or Humphrey — that taught sequential storytelling, expressive bodies, and comic timing directly to the comic strip's earliest practitioners.