Introduction of the Gout

A corpulent, white-wigged gentleman reclines at a laden table—pineapple, decanters, fruit—popping food into his mouth while a small black demon, cloven-hoofed and grinning, clamps a bellows to the man's bandaged, inflamed foot and fans glowing coals beneath it. The caption reads Introduction of the Gout. Cruikshank's hand-coloured lithograph sits squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of moral-medical satire: excess punished grotesquely, the body as moral ledger. That tradition—sequential image, speech-implied action, printed mass distribution—fed directly into the nineteenth-century illustrated press and, eventually, the comic strip.