Thomas Rowlandson

HarlotsProgressDet

20 Jan 2020

Doctors Differ: Early Medical Caricature & the Birth of the Comics Form

This grows out of a talk I first gave at the American Association for the History of Medicine Conference in Columbus in April, 2019. On October 30, I had the opportunity to give an expanded version for the Heberden Society History of Medicine Lecture series at the New York Academy of Medicine. I am immensely […]

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1 Sep 2019

Doctors Differ

There are many punchlines to which cartoonists would return time and again when addressing the topic of medicine, but “doctors differ” was without doubt the most popular. We see an early version of it in the background of the penultimate entry in William Hogarth’s series Harlot’s Progress where the famous patent medicine huckster of Covent […]

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10 Aug 2019

Thomas Rowlandson

Where Hogarth brought a fierce skepticism to the topic of English medicine of his time, Thomas Rowlandson was positively brutal in his caricatures of the profession. In this early caricature, for example, Rowlandson represents a gaggle of surgeons pinning a man down to amputate what appears to be a perfectly healthy leg. The terror in […]

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