The Last Gasp or Toadstools Mistaken for Mushrooms

The Last Gasp or Toadstools Mistaken for Mushrooms

Social satire, Medicine in art

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 drawing room. The doctor and his apprentice mimic the grotesque expressions of the patients and stick out their tongues as well. The print proposes that the man’s indiscriminate appetite has led him and his wife to an appropriate fate that the doctor has no skills to prevent. But the mirroring figures also suggest there is no way to tell the practitioners of medicine apart from their patients: whether toadstools or mushrooms, all are equally foolish.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)

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Thomas Tegg, London

1813

Debra Cashion, in collaboration with Elisabeth Barrett, '15

Hand-colored etching; original dimensions, 345 x 249 mm

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Still image

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