Judge — January 19, 1901 — page 16: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a joke playing on the term "nervous prostration" (a Victorian-era diagnosis roughly equivalent to nervous breakdown or depression). The cartoon depicts two men in conversation. Mrs. Johnson mentions that Mr. Jackson's wife has "nervous prostration," but Mr. Jackson corrects her: his wife has the nervousness, but *he* gets the prostration—meaning he's the one who ends up exhausted and worn out dealing with her condition. The humor relies on the stereotype of wives as emotionally high-strung and demanding, with husbands bearing the physical/mental burden of managing them. The dialect suggests working-class characters, typical of Judge's satirical approach to domestic relations and gender dynamics of the early 1900s.