Giving Up the Ghost, or One Too Many

A bloated, wig-wearing physician slumps asleep beside his patient's deathbed while the corpse lies rigid beneath a sheet. At the broken window, a skeletal Death peers in triumphantly; at the door, a top-hatted undertaker's man arrives with a coffin — his services apparently anticipated. The hand-coloured etching works in the Rowlandson vein: loose, fluid line, exaggerated bulk, red-nosed incompetence presented as comic type. The physician is class caricature aimed at Georgian medical men widely suspected of hastening death through negligence or quackery — a recurring anxiety in an era before licensing reform. This tradition of sequential moral exposure, running from Hogarth's *Industry and Idleness* through Gillray's political plates to Daumier's lithographed bourgeois, taught European and American cartoonists the vocabulary — exaggerated physiognomy, visual irony, captioned punchline — that passed directly into the comic strip.