Browse Items (74 total)

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…

As in Molière’s comedic plays, Rowlandson’s The Last Gasp demonstrates the gullibility of people who depend on quacks. In the image, a toad-like man and his wife stick out their tongues for a physician who visits them in their finely appointed…

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…

In The Company of Undertakers, Hogarth parodies the theme of medicine as a “noble” profession by creating a phony coat of arms emblazoned with the heads of physicians, all holding to their noses an attribute of their profession, a cane filled at the…

A Visit to the Doctor describes an appointment with a physician who could have belonged to Hogarth’s Company of Undertakers. He lives the lifestyle of a nobleman and receives patients in a well-appointed study attended by a footman. The bust of…

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…

Doctor Drainbarrel, “conveyed home in order to take his trial for neglect of family duty,” depicts an inebriated doctor unwillfully collected from a country ale house. Pushed in a wheel barrel by a servant with a roving eye, he is followed by his…

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…

In this print and the one opposite, Rowlandson illustrates two different types of playhouses and their audiences in English theatre during his time. This print portrays the attendance of two different productions at the same “patent” or “legitimate”…

In contrast to the opposite work about audience, this print illustrates attendance at non-patent or “illegitimate” theatres, one in London and one in the countryside. Non-patented theatres in England were theoretically illegal, so they usually…