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In Macassar Oil, an apothecary vendor pours oil on a bald man’s head, while a woman behind them looks shocked at the reflection of her hair standing on end. A sign on the rear wall advertises a miracle product: “Macassar Oil, for the Growth of Hair,…

While the physician in A Going! A Going! is more concerned with making money than healing patients, Doctor Doubledose allows the pleasures of the flesh to override his responsibilities to the sick. In this print the lustful physician shows no…

Rabelais helped to establish a French tradition for satirizing the medical profession that continued for generations in various artistic genres. The razor-witted Montaigne (1533-1592) once quipped, “And how many have not escaped dying, who have had…

The popular theme of the quack physician became a staple for playwrights such the English playwright Edward Ravenscroft (ca. 1654-1707). Today this author of the Restoration period (1660-1710) is relatively unknown, but his farce The Anatomist or The…

The great anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) complained about the damaged reputation of medicine in his preface to De Fabrica Corporis Humani. Vesalius blamed the profession itself for abandoning standards deserving of the public trust: “But it…

George Henry Harlow (1787-1819) was highly regarded as a portrait painter who produced many portraits of famous actors and actresses, as well as this portrait of Thomas Rowlandson at age of 58, two years after Rowlandson first produced The Tour of…

François Rabelais (ca. 1490-1553), who studied medicine at Paris just a few years before Vesalius, was likely a source of the derisive attacks against medicine addressed in the Fabrica: “we owe the fact that so many scoffs are wont to be cast at…

Attesting to the popularity of Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist is the eponymous print by Thomas Rowlandson, whose friend John Bannister (1760-1836) performed in the role of Crispin at Drury Lane. The print depicts a scene with Dr. Sawbones, his…

The English Short Title Catalogue lists six editions of Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist published between 1697 and 1763. The popularity of the play in the 18th century reflects the taste for bawdy comedy at the court of Charles II (1630-1685), first…

French theatre had a direct influence on English drama during the English Interregnum (1649-1660), when the theatres in England were closed by the Puritans and much of the English aristocracy lived in exile in France. Ravenscroft’s hilarious farce…