Sir Morell Mackenzie — 'Disease of the Throat'

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders the celebrated laryngologist Sir Morell Mackenzie in profile, his hands clasped behind a frock-coated back, chin tilted skyward with an air of patrician self-assurance. The caption — 'Disease of the Throat' — is characteristically Vanity Fair: deadpan, double-edged. Mackenzie was then notorious for his role treating Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia's fatal laryngeal cancer, having controversially reassured the court the tumour was benign; the caption indicts both his specialism and his professional embarrassment. Pellegrini's line is lean and unsentimental — an elongated nose, sunken cheeks, the slight stoop of a thin man carrying great consequence. No ethnic caricature is deployed here; the satire is purely reputational, aimed at hubris rather than origin.