SOURCE: Wagner, Peter. “The Satire on Doctors in Hogarth's Graphic Works.” In Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, pp. 200-25. London: Routledge, 1993.

[In the following essay, Wagner studies popular attitudes toward the medical profession using the various representations of doctors in Hogarth's graphic texts.]

I

My interest in this chapter is in the ways Hogarth appropriates and handles various forms of popular texts and codes while creating his own ‘texts’. By analyzing the intertextual and intermedial nature of what are essentially palimpsests made up of visual and verbal crossings, I hope to shed some light on an aspect of popular attitudes towards doctors and, more specifically, of the mentalité behind the relations between patients and medical men and women.

In their recent study of doctors and doctoring in eighteenth-century England, Roy and Dorothy Porter dedicate an entire chapter to the analysis of ‘attitudes towards doctors’ (pp. 53-70). They concede that ‘scepticism—cynicism even—towards doctors was as old as the profession itself’ and that ‘ancestral stereotypes flourished about the ineptitude of old-style physicians and the blood-thirstiness of the traditional surgeon’, providing many examples from various discursive traditions (such as proverbs, diaries and epitaphs).¹ However, as social historians, they tend to explain this phenomenon not as ‘limp cliché’ but rather as an ‘understandable response to inevitable tensions between customers and clients’.² It is the contention of this chapter that in our necessarily slanted reconstructions of past historical periods we have overlooked the self-propelling power of discursive traditions, of ‘architexts’ in the true Genettian sense.³ Authors and artists have drawn on these traditions time and again, urging their audience to identify—and identify with—texts whose assumptions and prejudices finally constitute ways of perceiving and reacting to the world, something the historians of the Annales school have termed ‘mentalité’. I believe that this body of discursive and rhetorical forms intervened between patients and doctors in a decisive manner. If it is true that professions tend to create a ‘collective ideological carapace’, a sort of halo which is vital for conferring dignity and authority,⁴ it might be argued that patients, inspired and faced with a relentlessly derogatory discourse about doctors, had a very clear (if ‘wrong’) idea of physicians and quacks as a social group.⁵ The present chapter will try to show how this conception functions in the works of Hogarth.

II

Doctors⁶ appear frequently, if marginally, in Hogarth's graphic art. Given the realistic aspect of the Hogarthian prints, one is tempted to use them as historical evidence, to ‘read’ them, as it were, as representations of reality. It is only with the recent emergence of ‘New Historicism’, and especially in the context of re-evaluating the French Revolution, that we have begun to realize that visual representations are above all interpretations and that historians in particular have made little use of the potential evidence contained in paintings and prints.⁷

The ‘picture’—in a manner of speaking—gets even more complicated when one considers the fact that ‘all seeing [of works of art] is inflected by social and cultural processes’⁸ and that ekphrasis—that is, the verbal representation of a visual representation—continues to bother art historians.⁹ This is not the place to discuss the problems involved in ‘reading’ pictures, be it Diderot's seminal discussions of the Salons and Lessing's equally influential Laokoon or the explication of Hogarth's prints over the ages, from Lichtenberg, Trusler and Rouquet to Ronald Paulson.¹⁰ What we must keep in mind when looking at Hogarth's eighteenth-century scenes is, on the one hand, that they contain encoded messages in the form of interpretations of eighteenth-century reality,¹¹ and, on the other hand, that our own mentalité interferes in any reading of his graphic art.

What makes the Hogarthian engravings fascinating is thus not so much their realistic dimension but rather the artist's ideology and hermeneutics, his satirical strategy that was both ‘true to life’ and symbolical. When Hogarth shows us doctors, they are always embedded in verbal and iconic frameworks generating meanings within a larger satirical matrix. Like Swift, Hogarth was an iconoclast, driven by the Puritan and bourgeois wish to expose vice and to reform. But unlike the more radical Dean, Hogarth remade the images he broke, the central figure of the beautiful young woman being a prime example.¹² The primary themes of his graphic art are idolatry, the falsity of images, and—a consequence of the belief in idols—delusion which is apt to lead to madness. Most of his prints are dominated by these ideas. Before entering into a more detailed discussion of the texts and codes that undergird The Company of Undertakers (1737), one of his most aggressive satires on eighteenth-century doctors, I shall have a brief look at Hogarth's portrayals of and attacks on quacks and physicians as part and manipulators of the Georgian crowd, as intruders into the private sphere, and in their corporate capacity as surgeons and ‘accoucheurs’.

In one of Hogarth's early crowd scenes, Southwark Fair (1734), a quack appears almost in the middle of the picture, below the central booth covering the church tower.¹³ Offering a pamphlet probably praising his nostrums, the doctor is pretending to swallow fire in order to attract attention. Dressed like a clown, his zany assistant is selling the quack's medicines. I have discussed this print elsewhere in the context of public entertainments and popular plays, which provides one way of reading it.¹⁴ In fact, Hogarth had in mind a generalized satirical comment on the coarse, disorderly character of English fairs in general and of Southwark Fair in particular. It can also be seen as a coda to the madhouse scene in plate 8 of The Rake's Progress (1735), as one of the first commentators, Lichtenberg, recognized when he underlined the ‘mystical triple alliance’ in this picture of acting or pretension, quackery and love.¹⁵ For all its lively description of popular theatricals, Hogarth's scene contains an implicit criticism of the crazy atmosphere of delusion and magic, thus endorsing a view of popular fairs that was shared by major Augustan writers who expressed a moral panic about the mingling of the high and the low at the site of such annual festivities.¹⁶

As far as the quack doctor and his harlequin are concerned, what is important here is first of all the fact that they are compared to the actors on the various stages and to the criminals around them, the ultimate intention being, of course, to suggest likeness. If the puppeteers, harlequins and actors vie for public attention with their playing—that is, pretence—so do the medical men below the central stage. Hence, the print tells us, they are mountebanks or impostors. A similar message (moral corruption) emerges when one looks at the other characters they are associated with. The quack is framed, as it were, by two criminal figures. On his right, in the foreground, an actor dressed as a Roman soldier is being arrested by a bailiff, one of Hogarth's ironic hints at the major theme of pretence, appearance and reality; and on his left, also in the foreground, a pickpocket diverts a couple's attention while stealing the man's wallet. To the right of this couple, two innocent country girls, one of them resembling Moll Hackabout in The Harlot's Progress, are being taxed by a man, probably a pimp.

The context (pretending to be someone else), the situation (the public fair and its delusions), and the similarities suggested by the iconographic comparisons with actors and criminals thus characterize the medical men in this instance. Hogarth has included another visual hint, a plebeian sub-text that allows the observer to recognize the true nature of the would-be doctors. The assistant's clownish garb recalls the popular Continental stories about the medieval figure of Til Eulenspiegel, the wise jester and charlatan who enjoyed playing pranks on the good, trustful burghers.¹⁷ The other ‘architext’ that comes into play with the clown's clothes is the literature and theatrical repertoire about Harlequin. Like Punch, he was one of the most popular figures in eighteenth-century theatricals, such as ballad operas and drolls. Significantly, the harlequin played any kind of role or character to please the audience.¹⁸ Hogarth uses the harlequin's chequered dress several times in his graphic works, and especially in connection with doctors and clergymen; in each case the implication is that the person thus associated with Scaramouche or Harlequin is a manipulator who will make his audience believe in dangerous illusions.¹⁹

Although this print does not tell us the names of the quacks, we see, however, that the doctor is actively puffing his powers in the pamphlet he offers for sale. Social history has shown that in the eighteenth century medicine was literally ‘in the market-place’.²⁰ Hogarth's graphic works repeatedly attest to this fact, although implicitly warning against both the quacks and their nostrums. Thus in the first plate, Morning … of Hogarth's series The Four Times of the Day (1738), another scene depicting a London crowd, the therapeutic power of Dr Rock's medicine is put into question by several iconic signs and details.²¹ On the left, two boys on their way to school are watching a peasant woman with a basket of vegetables on her head. Like two other women in front of her, she has been attracted by a quack, possibly Dr Rock himself, whose board advertises ‘Dr Rock's panacea’.²² Paulson notes that the royal arms on the quack's board indicate that his practice is sanctioned by a patent and that the panacea promises another way of escaping from the wintry cold.²³ To convey the idea to the observer that this is an illusion, in fact a dangerous lie, Hogarth first situates the quack and his wares in the seamy location of Covent Garden and then aligns him with particular characters. We are watching a scene outside ‘Tom King's Coffee House’, a notorious tavern frequented by criminals, whores and rakes, and conveniently close to Mother Douglas's brothel. The doctor is thus likened to criminals and prostitutes. The lady walking to church finds herself between the quack, on the left, and the group of people, at the right, whom she regards disapprovingly. Visually, the engraving seems to equate the two groups. Hogarth urges us indeed to compare the quack and his ‘panacea’ to the love-making in front of the coffee-house. The two males (rakes or criminals) fondling the girls are trying to get warm, so to speak, Hogarth's point being that for the young women to give in to this temptation is as dangerous as to buy the nostrum of the medical seducer. As the market girls will suffer if they yield to the rakes (venereal disease or, worse, prostitution), so the buyer of Dr Rock's medicine will be dissatisfied with his purchase.

Another implication of the print is that Covent Garden is indeed the ideal location for the nostrum of Dr Richard Rock (1690-1777) to be offered for sale, for his ‘famous Anti-Venereal, Grand, Specifick Pill’, thus advertised in The Craftsman (24 February 1733),²⁴ was supposed not only to help against the cold but also to cure venereal disease. In the final crowd scene I want to discuss here, The March to Finchley (1750, revised in 1761), Hogarth refers again to Dr Rock's pill while demonstrating the presence and importance of medical advertising in eighteenth-century London.²⁵ Behind the drummer, at far left, a soldier is looking at an advertisement that is fixed to the wall and probably praises the usefulness of Dr Rock's medicine. The soldier is obviously trying to urinate. There is a typical ironic Hogarthian touch in this marginal scene in that the gesture of the woman in the window, above the soldier, is ambiguous: she either waves to someone or, more likely, shields her right eye from a possibly obscene view—but her fingers are not closed and do allow a peek. The soldier's grimace suggests that he is in pain, possibly caused by syphilis, and in dire need of a useful ‘pill’. The soldier may eventually purchase the nostrum to relieve his pain, but Hogarth wants the observer to know again that trusting in Dr Rock's cure is unwise and might even be dangerous. For the small marginal scene is surrounded by and thus related to criminal or immoral behaviour: thus behind the soldier we see two political schemers, a Frenchman and a Scots Highlander (the political context is the recent invasion of Scotland by Bonnie Prince Charlie); the old newspaper vendor in the centre foreground is a Papist selling seditious papers; and there are also pickpockets, thieves and an immoral gin seller. The atmosphere is dominated by promiscuity, disorder and make-belief, which all affect our ‘reading’ of Dr Rock's advertisement.

This piece of writing refers to the sub-text of a large body of paramedical literature which, as far as venereal disease and gynaecology were concerned, played upon and exploited the prurient interest of readers.²⁶ A similar sign looms up at the right: the brothel (note the emblematical cats on the roof), where the suffering soldier in front of Dr Rock's advertisement probably caught his disease, is another Hogarthian hint at the popular satirical discourse about bawds, whores and their customers.²⁷ One of them, Mother Douglas,²⁸ a pious Methodist bawd from Covent Garden, appears in the lower window, clasping her hands and praying for the speedy return of her soldiers. Her prayer, Hogarth seems to imply, is as ‘moral’, trustworthy and useful as Dr Rock's notice facing her on the other wall.

As we move, with Hogarth, from the depiction of the London doctor in the crowd to that of the medical men in the private sphere of the home, we notice a change in the ‘codes’ that inform the prints. The pictorial characterization of the quack in the mob as demagogue and manipulator draws on age-old popular satires and related discourse casting physicians as useless charlatans. Hogarth's interior scenes, however, while never abandoning the appeal to the popular (satirical) notion of a ‘doctor’, seem to rely more on the traditional role of medical men in drama. It is here that Hogarth comes closest to Fielding. An early example is Plate 5 of The Harlot's Progress (1732). The poses struck by the two doctors at the left are indeed so histrionic as to remind one immediately of similar ‘doctors’ in plays by Fielding and Molière—which is exactly one of the points Hogarth wants to make.²⁹ The two medical men shown in consultation were well known in their time for their ‘pills’ against venereal disease. The fat one has been identified as the inventor of the nostrum we saw advertised in the scenes discussed above: in the third state of this plate, the paper holding Moll Hackabout's teeth (at the right) bears the inscription ‘Dr Rock’. Richard Rock is having an argument with his no less famous French confrère, Dr Jean Misaubin (d. 1734). The inventor of a drop for prophylaxis and all kinds of VD, Misaubin was the butt of several pictorial and verbal satires, including Fielding's The Mock Doctor (1732).³⁰

The texts Hogarth introduces here, both those that can be seen and the invisible ‘codes’ that appeal to the popular mentalité, constitute a radical if traditional condemnation of doctors and their cures. The two physicians care more about their reputation (their argument is about the therapeutic value of their pills) than about the dying patient near the fireplace. This comical point would have been familiar to contemporary observers from similar scenes in the fictional and dramatic discourse concerned with doctors. Hogarth thus merely confirms a stereotype. The iconography of the print, with two papers in the foreground and two groups of people in the background and at the left, suggests that the ‘real’ texts—Dr Rock's prescription and the medical advertisement on the floor—should be related semantically to any process of signification. Since the texts refer to or have been written by the selfish charlatans at the left, they undermine any belief in the power of medicine offered by these men: Moll's teeth on Dr Rock's paper indicate that she has taken mercury upon his advice. It was the customary ‘salivation’ cure for syphilis—the result in Moll's case is that she has lost her teeth and is about to lose her life in a painful syphilitic death. The other text in the centre foreground establishes a visual and semantic triangle with the dying Moll and her son (the maid's gesture mirrors and represents the plebeian attitude towards doctors), and the doctors, the generators of the text and its lethal consequences. The paper reads ‘PRACTICAL SCHEME’ and, with reversed ‘Ns’, ‘ANODYNE’ (that is, necklace), picturing a necklace. This refers to a widely praised panacea of the time, such anodyne necklaces being sold as cures for the pains of teething and venereal disease. The Craftsman, for instance, ran an advertisement claiming therapeutic power for ‘Children's Teeth, Fits, Fevers, Convulsions, &c. and the great Specifick Remedy for the Secret Disease’ (2 December 1732).³¹ Both Misaubin and Rock had such advertisements published. Hogarth generates ironic meaning here by suggesting a relation between the text of the boastful and mendacious medical advertisement and the equally deceitful medical men on the one hand, and the gullible, suffering patients on the other hand. An additional level of irony emerges when one considers that the dying harlot, trusting the medical advice given in the paper, has bought the medicine for her son too. Hogarth implies that the boy might suffer the same fate as his mother.³²

In the similar death scene depicted in the final plate of Marriage à-la-Mode (1745), Hogarth creates yet another visual and semantic triangle between the signifiers on the floor (a text and an empty bottle) and the human characters arranged almost in one line, the doctor (at the right) leaving through the door and the apothecary berating an imbecile servant (at the left) because he fetched the laudanum bottle. The plate has been explained in detail by a number of commentators.³³ What is important for the present context is the way Hogarth appeals to popular conceptions of doctors and thus manoeuvres the medical men into the position of culprits and selfish, heartless charlatans. As in the scene showing the harlot's death, we are reminded here of the professional rivalries (between physicians and apothecaries) with which contemporaries were familiar from newspapers and social satires. In tune with this satirical spirit, Hogarth implies that such quarrelling is always to the detriment of the patient. The gentleman physician from Westminster (his wig and sword mark his social position), who could well be imagined in a contemporary comedy, leaves a sordid form of death to be dealt with by the socially inferior apothecary. We shall encounter his typical gesture (holding the end of his cane to his nose) again in Hogarth's general satire on quacks—in this instance, the gesture is a signifier of the man's profession and affectation.

Like this fashionable and expensive doctor whom the miserly alderman may have called too late, the apothecary should be seen in relation to the physician and Lady Squanderfield's callous father. Identified by the nosegay in his buttonhole and the clyster syringe and julep in his pocket, the apothecary is a caricature and emblematically represents his trade: he is an achondroplastic dwarf. Cowley remarks that such a malformed quack would have been unlikely to charge high prices—which reflects on the selfish frugality of the alderman (he also depends upon a cheap, idiotic servant)³⁴ who is, ultimately, as responsible for the untimely death by suicide of his daughter as the useless medical men he has called. Hogarth both underlines and deconstructs the pretension of the medical profession, upheld by social satire, by showing such signs of affectation even in the lowly apothecary. Cowley's commentary is useful here:

The sayings ‘to talk like an apothecary’, meaning to prattle, and ‘as proud as an apothecary’ indicate a proverbial self-esteem. This apothecary's little finger is crooked like those of the other affected characters in the series. His feet are arranged in imitation of the supposedly elegant attitude with one heel turned towards the inner ankle of the other foot. The attempt at gracefulness is ridiculed in the heaviness of his legs and his rough behaviour. … To have been fooled by an imbecile servant can be taken as a blow to the apothecary's characteristic pride and as a goad to his officiousness.³⁵

As in the case of the harlot's boy, the Countess's child³⁶ also becomes a sign in the more general sub-text condemning parents (the alderman, his daughter and her dead husband) for the sins, including diseases, they pass on to their helpless children: the brace showing under the child's dress (indicating rickets) and the ‘beauty spot’ on the cheek, which is really a venereal sore,³⁷ tell the observer not only that Hogarth had more than a layman's familiarity with contemporary medical lore (such as treatises on children's diseases and VD).³⁸ The child, definitely the last in this physically and morally corrupt family, suffers for the profligacy of her or his parents and grandparents. This line of disease and sinning stretches all the way back to the Earl, in the first picture, who is afflicted with gout (implying a life of excessive drinking, eating and fornicating).

Apart from the old servant woman, the imbecile servant, at the left, although formally responsible for the death of the Countess, is the only one who seems to be horrified at the selfishness of the people, including the doctors, assembled in this room. The servant's stare recalls, and finally confirms, the ominous stare of the Medusa in the first plate, a scene also dominated by greed and narcissism.³⁹

Hogarth has also created satirical glimpses of the private sphere of a quack's office and of the dissecting-room of surgeons. As can be expected, both views contain a multitude of visual and verbal crossings that, when seen together, characterize doctors as a selfish, ignorant and cruel lot. In Plate 3 of Marriage à-la-Mode (1745) Hogarth takes us inside the house of a doctor we have already met in Plate 5 of The Harlot's Progress: it is Dr Misaubin (this time a little less emaciated than in the other satirical portrait) we see surrounded by his medical paraphernalia⁴⁰ and a customer dissatisfied with the ‘anti-venereal’ pill he has received from the French quack. If the commentators on this picture agree that, although the meaning is in general clear, particulars remain open to disagreement,⁴¹ it is because Hogarth makes great demands on the observer of a truly dramatic scene.⁴² To decipher this palimpsest one is supposed to have not only a working knowledge of medical practice and to be familiar with the inside of an eighteenth-century doctor's laboratory, but we are also urged to consider and bring into the picture, as it were, texts about and from doctors, such as Samuel Garth's Dispensary (1706), a description of a doctor's surgery which Hogarth drew upon, earlier pictorial representations and even emblems.

Because I can refer the reader to Cowley's detailed discussion of the plate, I shall limit myself to a few remarks about the signifiers and codes establishing the pejorative meaning of the quack and his nostrums. To begin with, ‘Monsieur de la Pilule [sic]’, Misaubin's nickname, is depicted as a physically ugly character (cf. the viscount's face), a social upstart who used to practise as a barber-surgeon. Above the showcase in the back we see a glass urinal, a brass shaving-dish, and, near it, a narwhal tusk that resembles a barber's pole. A quack who was widely known (and satirized) for his conceit and pride,⁴³ Misaubin has risen in the world as the elaborate machines and books at the left indicate. The title page of the book explains that the machines, invented by ‘Mr de la Pillule’ and approved by the ‘Académie Royal [sic]’ in Paris, are for straightening dislocated limbs and drawing corks from bottles.⁴⁴ Misaubin, then, is a projector of the kind ridiculed in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. All iconographic signs suggest, indeed, that to deal with him is tantamount to a death sentence. Thus the skeletons in the cupboard, depicted in mock-amorous advances, foretell the future of the couple in front of them. Lord Squanderfield's cane, which mockingly threatens the doctor, ironically touches Misaubin's periwig, accidentally pointing at the cause of death and establishing a visual line between the skeletons, himself and the physician. The link between the doctor and death is further made by the tripod on the cupboard that resembles the triple gallows at Tyburn, and by the skull beside Misaubin, an emblem of vanitas in earlier seventeenth-century paintings, which is quite obviously marked by symptoms of ‘pox’, the nobleman's present disease. Dead crocodiles, monsters, bones and cadavers (some of them emblems of death) give the scene a flavour of pagan ritual, equating medicine with black magic and introducing the ‘dance of death’ motif (notice the seduction scene in the cupboard and the visual linking in a semi-circle of the characters), which is one of the codes Hogarth has tapped for this seemingly humorous scene.⁴⁵ In fact, all forms of verbal and pictorial discourse recalled in the print (for example, paramedical works about monsters and syphilis, satires about quacks, and even Cervantes's Don Quixote⁴⁶) contribute to the ultimate deprecatory view of the doctor.

To a certain extent this characterization is of course conditioned by the plebeian opinion of physicians to which Hogarth caters in several instances, and perhaps most obviously in The Reward of Cruelty (1751), an attack on the callousness of surgeons that constitutes the final plate of the series The Four Stages of Cruelty. The realistic interior shows a number of details that have been identified. In fact, what we are allowed to see is a composite made up of the Cutlerian theatre of the Royal College of Physicians in Warwick Lane and the old Barber-Surgeons' Hall in Monkwell Street.⁴⁷ Among the forms of discourse generating meaning in this print, two important genres are crime literature⁴⁸ and the popular satire on surgeons as a corporate group.⁴⁹ Hogarth's bitter satirical point is that Tom Nero, the cruel hero of the series whose body is being dissected, has finally fallen into the hands of surgeons. Together with the barristers, surgeons belonged to the professional groups to whom satiric tradition attributes the most callous self-interest.⁵⁰ If, in this instance, Hogarth depicts the sadistic pleasures of dissecting, the assembled surgeons enjoying their work as much as Tom Nero enjoyed his brutal deeds, it is because his stance is in tune with a popular mentalité shared by elite writers and the common people. Swift, we must remember, begins to undermine the reliability of his narrator on the very title page of Gulliver's Travels, where the paratext links the hero, ‘first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several Ships’, with traditional liars in travel literature and paramedical discourse.⁵¹ The plebeian attitude towards surgeons was partly conditioned by the fact that they habitually made off with the bodies of criminals hanged at Tyburn: the two skeletons in the picture, at left and at right, are those of former highwaymen. There were riots against this custom, resented by the public, and it was not until March 1752 that the law, responding to the Penlez riots of 1749, made dissection part of the official penalty the judge could impose upon certain criminals.⁵²

Despite the overtly moral caption and the condemnation expressed in the ‘explanatory’ verses, Hogarth's print expresses some of the popular sympathy for low-life rogues while equating the academic physicians (wearing birettas and mortar board) with criminals.

It is in Hogarth's The Company of Undertakers (1737) that one can detect the conflation of various forms of predominantly pejorative discourse about doctors. A sophisticated palimpsest, this engraving demonstrates that in the Hogarthian, iconographic text can be read ‘numerous other discourses’ which ‘impose a universe’ upon it.⁵³ The artist constantly urges the observer to activate the ‘déjà lu’,⁵⁴ appealing to presuppositions of an intersubjective prior body of discourse that contains codes which contribute to the signifying practice of the engraving.⁵⁵

The frame of the satire parodies the iconic and textual conventions of heraldry, subverting a number of traditional signifiers. Emblems of death surround the print.⁵⁶ This coat of arms for physicians⁵⁷ is contained within a black (‘sable’) border, indicative of death, and supported, as it were, on either side by two cross-bones borrowed from pirate flags and poison bottles and replacing the St Andrew's crosses. The motto is part of the frequently neglected ‘paratext’ of a work of art which comments on the meaning;⁵⁸ here it is both an emblem and a text, linking the practising of doctors with Virgil's description of the killing of Trojans: ‘Et plurima mortis imago’ (and everywhere the image of death) is taken from a passage in Book II of the Aeneid (ll. 360-70) where ‘countless bodies, helpless and murdered, litter the streets, lying in houses and even in the entrances to the temples’, where ‘the victorious Danaean falls, surrounded by wailing, terror, and death in a thousand shapes’. The title, The Company of Undertakers, would seem to deal the final blow to these Quacks in Consultation (one of the titles Hogarth originally considered for the print), confirming as it does the popular notion of ‘the Georgian medical profession as playing Jack Ketch to Death’.⁵⁹

As our glance moves from the frame to the inside, we notice that we need help to identify the objects and persons. This help is provided, tongue in cheek, by the explanatory text below the coat of arms. The text is itself accompanied by two footnotes, and apes the style of two famous English books of heraldry (mentioned in the notes), John Guillim's A Display of Heraldrie (1610) and Nicholas Upton's Libellus de officio militari (before 1446). The notes read:

∗ A Chief betokeneth a Senatour or Honourable Personage, borrowed from the Greeks, & is a Word signifying a Head; & as the Head is the Chief Part in a Man, so the Chief in the Escocheon should be a Reward of such only, whose High Merites have procured them Chief Place, Esteem, or Love amongst Men. Guillim. ∗∗ The bearing of Clouds in Armes (saith Upton) doth import some Excellencie.

Understanding this textual information requires a knowledge of the laws of heraldry (for example, that no colour-name be repeated). The syntax of the first sentence equates the urinal (as the first object described it is the most important part of the arms) with twelve quack heads and twelve cane heads or (that is, gold or golden) which/who are consultant.

‘Of the second’ refers to the second colour (white). Hogarth has deliberately turned the professional pyramid of physicians upside down, for the twelve respectable doctors (two were identified by J. Nichols), probably university-trained, in the centre are dominated or ruled by three well-known contemporary quacks. The twelve doctors are depicted with a typical professional gesture. They hold their gold-headed canes to their chins and noses, which suggests deep thought (ridiculed by the scatological detail of the urinal) as well as the original purpose of the cane head that contained pomander or disinfectant (for example, vinaigrette).

The background of the upper part of the escutcheon (‘ermine’) introduces what may be called ‘the French connection’.⁶⁰ The word ‘ermine’ and the lilies immediately suggest the splendid coat (and the royal arms) of the French kings, the best example in painting being Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV (1702). The French background is a sub-text of sorts, implying that these pompous doctors, like the French as a nation in the eighteenth century, are not to be trusted.⁶¹ Another connotation that should be considered is the waste of money and the idea of corruption traditionally associated with Versailles.

The quacks ruling the field here are a ‘compleat Doctor’; namely, the bone-setter Sarah Mapp (her cane is a huge bone), known as Crazy Sally. Hogarth refers to her with masculine pronouns, presumably because of her enormous physical strength. Equally interesting for the meaning of the print is her ‘checkie’ suit. Like the doctor's zany in Southwark Fair, discussed above, she is a harlequin, an ‘Eulenspiegel’ and mountebank, with whom people who want to remain sane and healthy ought to have no truck. The ‘demi-doctors’ at her left and right are the quack oculist John Taylor (1703), with one eye ‘conchant’ (that is, couchant) that seems to have escaped to his cane head; and Joshua Ward (1685-1761) who, after a disreputable career, began to practise medicine in 1733 and was called ‘Spot’ Ward for a port-wine birth-mark on his face (in the text below the escutcheon, ‘Faced per pale proper & Gules’ refers to this: ‘per pale’ is a vertical division into half, and ‘gules’ indicates the colour of the mark). Ward performed several ‘marvellous cures’, became fashionable in aristocratic circles, and, like ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, Mrs Mapp and James Graham, was one of the quacks and medical showmen who swaggered around in carriages and commanded public acclaim and ample fortunes.⁶²

These three quacks were so well known that Hogarth could expect his audience to be familiar with the numerous references to them in the newspapers, in countless epigrams, songs and satires. The iconographic details of the print, suggesting the ideas of pretence, danger, deceit and—above all else—death, also allude to the fact that Ward's famous ‘Drop and Pill’, which contained antimony and arsenic, led to death in about 50 per cent of the cases.⁶³

III

The Hogarthian portrayal of medical men and women was thus exclusively derogatory and pejorative. But how could it have been different in an age when almost all forms of verbal and pictorial discourse⁶⁴ condemned doctors as dangerous charlatans, and when the popular mentalité, in a most telling fashion, suggested to keep the doctor away by eating an apple a day? It could be shown that in literature and art (especially in the more popular and satiric forms) ‘the doctor is an ancient cock-shy’.⁶⁵ The physician as the butt of gibes and the object of derision is, in fact, an age-old ‘type’, a stereotype even, we encounter, as we move back in time, in the works of Molière and Montaigne, Cervantes and Rabelais, in the medieval fabliaux and comedies, and, ultimately, in Roman and Greek literature (the comedies of Plautus and Aristophanes), Martial's famous epigrammatic snipes being at the beginning of the recorded discourse about doctors.⁶⁶ And the classics were, of course, read and revived in the ‘Augustan’ eighteenth century.

Similarly, the medical and paramedical discourse of the time was hardly likely to make patients change their attitudes towards doctors. Feuds, jealousies, demarcation disputes and downright slandering raged in the press. From the public's point of view, virtual battles were fought over drops and pills. All kinds of people suddenly decided to voice their opinions on medical issues. This created a highly competitive market, shared by learned doctors and professors, steeped in the medical lore of their day, and by tinkers and quacks who became self-styled experts overnight.⁶⁷ We get a good impression of the ‘low’ origins of medicine and of the bad reputation of its practitioners in Hogarth's Night (1738), where the barber (in the window at the left) shaving a client announces his skills on a sign board: ‘Shaving Bleeding & Teeth Drawn with a Touch Ecce Signum’. In the context of eighteenth-century satire, it is typical again that Hogarth characterizes this barber-surgeon by associating him with yet another shady London location, and by juxtaposing his sign and barber's pole with the signs of houses of ill repute (‘Bagnio’ and ‘The New Bagnio’).⁶⁸ When such scandals as the Mary Tofts affair broke, they merely confirmed prejudiced opinions about the charlatanerie involved in medicine, opinions that were part of the age-old plebeian suspicion of intellectuals.⁶⁹ In Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (December 1726), Hogarth mocked not merely the credulity and attacked the connivance of those doctors and accoucheurs who had really believed in (or thought to profit from) Mrs Toft's birth of rabbits, he also condemned the gullibility of the public.⁷⁰ He was later to include Mary Tofts in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762), his final attack on the idolatrous belief in illusions and magic.

It was partly because of such scandals, of which many ended with the patient's death, and partly because of the perennial pejorative writing about medical men, that the bad reputation of doctors continued in verbal and visual satire, informing even the smallest details of artistic representation. My last example in this context is a marginal figure in Plate 2 of Hogarth's The Times (1763).⁷¹ Behind the offenders in the pillory, Miss Fanny (the Cock Lane Ghost) and Wilkes, who are being punished for deluding or manipulating the populace, Hogarth shows us another manipulator in a low window. This is Thomas Secker, the Archbishop of Canterbury. As a favourite of George III (the King, as the figurehead of the Bute ministry, is here implicitly criticized), he had crowned and married the King. Hogarth expresses disapproval of the Archbishop's role both through the behaviour of the divine and the sign above the window. Instead of giving the cripples in front of him what they really need—water and bread—the Archbishop bestows only a blessing (through the window) on them. The inscription above him reads ‘Dr Cants ye Man Midwife’. It clearly appeals to the observer of the picture to ‘read’ this selfish and sanctimonious person within the mentalité fostered by two forms of popular discourse: the satires on clergymen (‘cant’; that is, insincere talk, stretching back in time to the Puritans); and the satirical writing about doctors in general, and man-midwives (including prurient aspects) in particular. It is such seemingly marginal details that demonstrate to what extent Hogarth drew on and played with the clichés and stereotypes of a mentalité that seems to have encompassed the plebeians as well as the elite in eighteenth-century England.⁷²

In this he resembled Fielding.⁷³ Although the author of Tom Jones had no reason to complain about the physicians who treated him and his wife,⁷⁴ his acerbic attacks on doctors, in his farces and novels, are far more stereotyped than Hogarth's graphic satires. Exploiting the obvious advantages of images over writing and drawing on both verbal and pictorial discourse, Hogarth had at his disposition the visual power and semantic ambiguity of intermedial icons. In comparison, Fielding was much more hemmed by the conventions of those parts of discursive satire which he made his province—the farce and the satirical novel, his ‘comic epic poem in prose’. Inherited mainly from Molière, Cervantes and Roman satirists, the traditions of satirical discourse called for representative caricatures that could be immediately recognized by the audience. Fielding's doctors, incorporating all the evils of their profession, may hardly ever rise above the prejudiced view of burlesque satire, but they offer more than meets the eye at first glance.⁷⁵

Upon closer analysis, the stock characters and stereotypes we meet in the works of Hogarth and Fielding prove to be neither primitive nor useless. Stereotyping has always been and continues to be an essential part of social communication, whether in literature or in everyday life.⁷⁶ Stereotypes provide the ‘metaphors we live by’, reducing the anxieties and complexities of living and understanding to cognitive models and ‘new realities’ we can handle.⁷⁷ From an objective point of view they may not be accurate, yet they allow us to communicate. Outstanding artists and writers like Hogarth and Fielding make us aware of the functions of stylization by playing with clichés and prejudices and by drawing our attention to the texts and sub-texts that finally constitute the images they create for us.

Notes

1. Dorothy and Roy Porter, Patient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-century England, Cambridge: Polity Press (1989), pp. 54, 65; see also p. 66.

2. Ibid., pp. 55 and 57.

3. Gérard Genette discusses this term (that is, basic literary or discursive forms used throughout the ages) within the larger context of his analysis of intertextuality or ‘hypertextuality’ in Introduction à l'architexte, Paris: Seuil (1979), pp. 86-90; and Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil (1982), pp. 7-14. See also his recent Seuils, Paris: Seuil (1987), pp. 7-19.

4. Porter and Porter, Patient's Progress, p. 69, refer to ‘professionalization’ theorists who have perceived such a process.

5. Porter and Porter believe the contrary, arguing that ‘Georgian patients had little conception of the medical profession as a comprehensive entity’; see ibid., p. 69.

6. By ‘doctor’, a rather anachronistical term in this context, I mean any kind of professional healer. Although medical propaganda saw a tripartite professional hierarchy in the eighteenth century—from the university-educated physicians, to the manually trained surgeons, and the apothecaries down at the bottom—this hardly corresponds to reality. In fact, Dorothy and Roy Porter have shown that there was a large group of irregular practitioners, including quacks, and that ‘for the great mass of Georgian doctors, corporate affiliation was relatively irrelevant’, while ‘the divide between reputable … practitioners … and … quacks, might seem fluid and elusive’. See their Patient's Progress, pp. 18-19, 23.

7. For a discussion of this problem, with some helpful suggestions towards a better use of ‘pictures’, see Rolf Reichardt, ‘Mehr geschichtliches Verstehen durch Bildillustration? Kritische Überlegungen am Beispiel der Französischen Revolution’, Francia 13 (1985): 511-23. Reichardt has demonstrated the usefulness of the new ways of reading pictures he suggests here in Klaus Herding and Rolf Reichardt, Die Bildpublizistik der Französischen Revolution, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp (1989).

   See also my discussion of allegedly pornographic prints in revolutionary French pamphlets and books in ‘Antiaristocratic Erotica before and during the French Revolution: Problems and Perspectives’, in Evolutions et révolutions, Suzy Halimi and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (eds), Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne (1992).

   A brief summary of the assumptions of ‘New Historicism’ (for example, that social and cultural events commingle messily and that literary and non-literary ‘texts’ circulate inseparately) can be found in the introduction (by H. Aram Veeser) to The New Historicism, H. Aram Veeser (ed.), London: Routledge (1989), pp. ix-xvi.

8. Grant F. Scott, ‘The rhetoric of dilation: ekphrasis and ideology’, Word and Image 7(4) (1991): 310.

9. A major subject of contention is the question whether or not there are distinctions between the codes or ‘texts’ of language and art. Are there great differences between the temporal nature of language and the spatial character of art, as Lessing maintained in his Laokoon, or do writing and the visual arts ‘cohabit’ the same representational space, as Bryan Wolf argues in his recent ‘Confessions of a closet ekphrastic’, Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (1990): 181-204? Semioticians, who eliminate the view that aesthetic value is an immanent characteristic of works of art and who thus decentre the role of the historian and of interpretation, have little difficulty in answering the question. See, for instance, Keith P. F. Moxey, ‘Semiotics and the social history of art’, New Literary History 22(4) (1991): 985-1001. But among more traditional art historians the issue remains controversial. For a discussion of the development of art criticism, ekphrasis, and the issues of signifaction, from Diderot and Lessing down to our days, see Grant F. Scott's ‘The rhetoric of dilation’, quoted above, Bernard Dieterle's study, Erzählte Bilder: zum narrativen Umgang mit Gemälden, Marburg: Hitzeroth (1988); James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and representation’, New Literary History 22(3) (1991): 297-317; and David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press (1991), pp. 101-21.

10. In addition to Dieterle's study mentioned above, see Frederick Burwick, ‘The hermeneutics of Lichtenberg's interpretation of Hogarth’, Lessing Yearbook 19 (1987): 165-89; and Klaus Herding's essay on Lichtenberg in his Im Zeichen der Aufklärung, Frankfurt: Fischer (1989): pp. 127-63. Significantly, there is no ‘Critical Heritage’ volume on Hogarth and his commentators. Given the long line of explicators, it seems high time to publish a book providing a survey of the ways Hogarth's prints have been seen over the ages.

11. See, for instance, Uwe Böker's detailed and thoughtful study of the social background that gave rise to Hogarth's picture of the Grub Street poet, ‘“The distressed writer”: Sozialhistorische Bedingungen eines berufsspezifischen Stereotyps in der Literatur und Kritik des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, Günther Blaicher (ed.), Tübingen: Narr (1987), pp. 140-54.

12. For a discussion of the Hogarthian iconoclastic aesthetics in this context, see Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking. Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (1989), pp. 149-203. See also my article on Swift's iconoclastic satires set in women's dressing rooms: ‘Breaking the idol woman: the Dean as iconoclast’, Anglia 110 (Sept. 1992), where in the final section I compare Swift and Hogarth.

13. See Ronald Paulson's third revised edition of Hogarth's Graphic Works, London: The Print Room (1989), no. 131, commentary pp. 86-9. Unless indicated otherwise, all references in this article to Hogarth's engravings are to this edition.

14. See my ‘Hogarth's graphic palimpsests: intermedial adaption of popular literature’, Word and Image 7(4) (1991), especially pp. 331-5.

15. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. 10. Lieferung, Göttingen: Dieterich (1808), p. 19.

16. For an analysis of the growing importance of bourgeois repressive discourse on popular culture, see the chapter on ‘The grotesque body and the Smithfield muse’ in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen (1986), pp. 80-125.

17. It is curious that Till (or Til) Eulenspiegel never seems to have become as well known in England as he was and is on the Continent. A witty jester, he was the hero of the common people and he often made the rich burghers the victims of his practical jokes. His pranks were first recorded in Dutch around 1450 and then translated into German (Strasbourg, 1515). The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Owlglass’, notes that a ‘German jest-book [was] translated into English c. 1560’. Hogarth probably knew ‘Owlglass’, either from such an English translation or from the works of the Dutch painters and engravers. On the Continent, Eulenspiegel was revived and again popularized by Charles de Coster's French (Belgian) rendering published in 1868.

18. On the importance of the harlequin in eighteenth-century popular plays and operas, see my article, ‘Hogarth's graphic palimpsests’; Edmond M. Gagey, Ballad Opera, New York: Columbia University Press (1937; repr. New York: Blom, 1965); Sybil Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1960); Richard Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press (1978); Pat Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-century England, Brighton: Harvester Press (1985), pp. 40-71; and Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986), pp. 67-90.

19. See, for instance, the preacher in the pulpit of the Methodist meeting house in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762). Hogarth characterizes him as a deceiving and possibly satanic manipulator of a malleable audience. I have discussed this print and the figure of the preacher in ‘Hogarth's graphic palimpsests’, pp. 341-2. In addition, see ‘Crazy Sally’ in The Company of Undertakers (1737), discussed below.

20. See Dorothy and Roy Porter, Patient's Progress, pp. 18-30.

21. For a detailed description, see Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 104-5. The art-historical background of the series is the subject of Sean Shesgreen's detailed study Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1983), pp. 89-155.

22. See also the graphic satire in the British Museum, Dr Rock in Covent Garden, BM Sat. 2475; and Hogarth's The March to Finchley and Plate 4 of The Harlot's Progress, discussed below.

23. Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 105.

24. Quoted in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 82.

25. For a detailed commentary, see Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 141-5.

26. I have discussed the erotic and partly pornographic dimension of this discourse in my Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America, London: Secker & Warburg (1988; repr. Grafton, 1990), pp. 8-47.

27. See my Eros Revived, pp. 133-45.

28. She also appears in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (Plate 11) and Enthusiasm Delineated (1761), the first state of Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762).

29. My discussion relies in part on Paulson's commentary in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 82.

30. See also A. Pond's etching, Prenez des pilules (1739), which is based on a portrait-sketch by Watteau: British Museum Sat. 1987.

31. Quoted in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 82. On the necklace, yet another example of those Hogarthian signifiers that refer to lost discursive traditions, see Francis Doherty, ‘The anodyne necklace: a quack remedy and its promotion’, Medical History 34(3) (1990): 268-93.

32. Paulson, in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 82, suggests that Moll might also be trying to treat her own disease in the child, parents passing their ‘sins’ on to their children in the form of such diseases being one of Hogarth's themes (cf. Plate 6 of Marriage à-la-Mode).

33. See Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 122-4; Robert L. S. Cowley, ‘Marriage à-la-Mode:’ A Re-view of Hogarth's Narrative Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press (1983), pp. 146-60; William Hogarth: Der Kupferstich als moralische Schaubühne, Herwig Guratzsch and Karl Arndt (eds), Stuttgart: Hatje (1987), pp. 132-3; and William Hogarth. Das vollständige graphische Werk, Berthold Hinz and Hartmut Krug (eds), 3rd edn, Giessen: Anabas (1988) pp. 134-5.

    See also my discussion of the ‘last dying speech’, on the floor, in the context of Hogarth's treatment of crime literature in ‘Hogarth, eighteenth-century literature, and the modern canon’, Proceedings of the Anglistentag 1990 Marburg, Claus Uhlig and Rüdiger Zimmermann (eds), Tübingen: Niemeyer (1991), pp. 456-80.

34. Marriage à-la-Mode, p. 149.

35. Ibid.

36. Some doubt exists over the sex of the child. Paulson (p. 123) and Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth, New York: Dover (1973), commentary on Plate 56, think she is a girl; Cowley (p. 150) argues the child is a boy.

37. For a detailed analysis of these ‘signs’, see Fred Lowe's recent article ‘Hogarth, beauty spots and sexually transmitted disease’, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies (1991).

38. Lowe notes that at the time Hogarth was producing his prints, the influential works of Jean Astruc, Regius Professor of Medicine in Paris and physician to the King of France, were translated into English. See, for instance, Astruc's A General and Compleat Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Children, London (1746); and the later Treatise of Venereal Disease (1754).

    See also the more sensational treatises on VD, which catered to prurient interests, discussed in my Eros Revived, pp. 16-46, 326-32.

39. On the role of the Medusa in Western culture, see the useful study by Jean Clair, Méduse. Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel, Paris: Gallimard (1989), especially ch. ix, ‘L'évidence de Narcisse’.

40. For an identification and discussion, see Cowley, Marriage à-la-Mode, pp. 88-99.

41. See Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 119-20; and Cowley, Marriage à-la-Mode, pp. 82-99.

42. For an analysis of the dramatic aspect of the series that stresses the resonances between the plates, see Lance Bertelsen, ‘The interior structures of Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode’, Art History 6(2) (1983): 131-42.

43. Paulson, in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 119, notes that Fielding mocked him in Tom Jones, Book xiii, ch. 2, when he wrote that Misaubin ‘used to say, that the proper direction to him was, “To Dr Misaubin, in the World”’.

44. The grammatical mistakes in the text (it should be ‘l'une’, ‘les épaules’, ‘inventées’ and ‘Royale’) suggest either that Hogarth wanted to ridicule Misaubin's bad spelling and thus expose his pretence or, more likely, that Hogarth's French was as poor as that of some modern commentators (cf. the mistakes in Paulson and Cowley).

45. See Lance Bertelsen, ‘The interior structures’, p. 137. On the eighteenth-century view of the doctor and death within the long Western history of ‘the culture of the Dance of Death’, see Roy Porter, ‘Death and the doctors in Georgian England’, in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), London: Routledge (1989), pp. 77-94.

46. Paulson, in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 120, connects some of the utensils on the cupboard—the barber's basin, the sword/lance, buckler and spur—which apparently refer to Don Quixote's ‘chivalric’ fight.

47. See W. Brockbank and J. Dobson, ‘Hogarth's anatomical theatre’, Journal of the History of Medicine 14 (1959): 351-53; and Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 151.

48. For a discussion of the engraving in this context, see my article ‘Hogarth, eighteenth-century literature, and the modern canon’.

49. Another sub-text is Hogarth's satire on the tradition of dissecting scenes in high art: see Paulson's commentary, including critical literature, in Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 152.

50. Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 152.

51. See my discussion of the highly intertextual and intermedial paratext (the title, the letters of the ‘editor’ and ‘author’, and the title page) of Gulliver's Travels in ‘Swift's great palimpsest: intertextuality and travel literature in Gulliver's Travels’, Dispositio. American Journal of Semiotics and Cultural Studies, special number: Crossing the Atlantic: Travel Literature and the Perception of the Other, Ottmar Ette and Andrea Pagni (eds) (1992).

52. See Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 151. Paulson notes that Field was also a pugilist. In addition, see Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn riots against the surgeons’ in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, Douglas Hay and P. Linebaugh (eds), Harmondsworth: Penguin (1977), pp. 65-119; and his recent The London Hanged: Crime and Society in the Eighteenth Century, London: Allen Lane (1991).

53. See Julia Kristeva, Sémeiotiké, Paris: Seuil (1969), p. 225; and La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil (1974), pp. 388-9. Although Kristeva is concerned with ‘poetic utterances’, her statement is equally applicable to Hogarth's images, which can be considered as ‘pictorial utterances’.

54. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, Paris: Seuil (1970), p. 16.

55. On this appeal of authors/artists to the reader/observer, see Jonathan Culler, ‘Presupposition and intertextuality’, in his The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1981), pp. 100-18, especially pp. 101-3.

56. M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire, London: Allen Lane (1967), p. 36.

57. For discussions of the details see Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 100-1; N. B. Gwyn, ‘Interpretation of the Hogarth print “The arms of the Company of Undertakers”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 8 (1940): 115-27; and the catalogue, William Hogarth, Hinz and Krug (eds), pp. 167-8.

58. For a detailed discussion of the functions of this ‘paratext’, including the motto, see Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris: Seuil (1987), pp. 134-50.

59. See Roy Porter, ‘Death and the doctors in Georgian England’, p. 78.

60. See E. Ch. Barschall, Die Werke von William Hogarth, Brünn and Vienna (1878), p. 13, quoted in the catalogue William Hogarth, Krug and Hinz (eds), pp. 167-8.

61. On the general dislike and caricaturing of Frenchmen in eighteenth-century England, see Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey (1986), especially pp. 31-9, ‘The supreme bugaboo: the French’, and Plate 61 in this collection of graphic satires: ‘Mour le médecin’.

62. See Roy Porter, ‘William Hunter: a surgeon and a gentleman’, in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-century Medical World, W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1985), p. 20. On the sexologist James Graham, see Porter's articles, ‘The sexual politics of James Graham’, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies 5 (1982): 201-6; and ‘Sex and the singular man: the seminal ideas of James Graham’, in my collection of essays published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 228 (1984): 1-24.

63. See Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 101, where Paulson quotes additional critical works about Ward.

64. See, for instance, the anonymous print The Quacks (17 March 1783) showing the famous quack doctors, James Graham and Gustavus Katterfelto. In addition, see Kate Arnold-Forster and Nigel Tallis (comp.), The Bruising Apothecary: Images of Pharmacy and Medicine in Caricature, London: Pharmaceutical Press (1989); and the caricatures of doctors in John Brewer, The Common People and Politics 1750-1790s, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey (1986), no. 101 (BM catalogue 3909, Sept. 1762): ‘The state quack’; and no. 10 (BM catalogue 2598, 1743): ‘Doctor Rock's political speech to the mob in Covent Garden’; Paul Langford, Walpole and the Robinocracy, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey (1986), no. 41 (BM catalogue 2268, c. 1735); and the caricature of a French doctor in Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, no. 61.

65. M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank, p. 36.

66. See ibid., where M. D. George provides some quotations from a first-century Greek epigram down to Wellington's remark, ‘all doctors are more or less quacks’.

67. There is a voluminous body of critical literature on the development of medicine, including quackery, in eighteenth-century England. Porter and Porter, in their Patient's Progress, provide useful surveys: see pp. 208-15; and especially the bibliography, pp. 250-84. In addition, see Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout, ‘Of masks and mills: the enlightened doctor and his frightened patient’, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, G. S. Rousseau (ed.), Los Angeles: University of California Press (1990), pp. 186-233; and, aiming at a wider readership, Guy Williams, The Age of Agony: The Art of Healing c. 1700-1800, London: Constable (1975).

    Also useful are G. S. Rousseau's collections of essays (published in various journals over the last twenty years) in Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Scientific and Medical, Manchester: Manchester University Press (1991); and Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Sexual, Historical, Manchester: Manchester University Press (1991).

    On the erotic dimension of medical and paramedical publications of the time, see my Eros Revived, 8-17, and the notes 323-32; and Roy Porter's ‘Love, sex and medicine’, in my Erotica and the Enlightenment, Frankfurt: Lang (1991), pp. 90-123.

68. For details of the print, see Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 106-8.

69. In this context, see Menken's De la charlatanerie des savans [sic], The Hague (1721), which has a telling frontispiece and vignette.

70. The case of the ‘Rabbit Woman’ from Godalming attracted considerable attention in the autumn of 1726, with newspapers, pamphlets, satires, cartoons, and even a theatrical scene (in Harlequin the Sorcerer), commenting on the illiterate woman who claimed she had been delivered of several rabbits. The ‘doctors’ involved naturally published their own accounts too. Sir Richard Manningham, the best known man-midwife of the day, finally discovered the imposture.

    For a discussion of the partly prurient and obscene literature about Mary Tofts, see my Eros Revived, pp. 42-6.

71. For a commentary, see Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 181-2.

72. For a discussion of the range of the popular mentalité vis-à-vis E. P. Thompson's thesis of the people's authentic popular culture, see my article ‘Hogarth's graphic palimpsests’, Word and Image 7(4) (1991): 341-3.

73. See the comparative study by Peter Jan de Voogd, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondences of the Arts, Amsterdam: Rodopi (1981).

74. For details, see Porter and Porter, Patient's Progress, pp. 104, 110-12, 177.

75. For examples of descriptions of doctors in Fielding's works, see The Mock Doctor or The Dumb Lady Cured (1732), derived from Molière's Le médecin malgré lui and dedicated to ‘Dr John Misaubin’; and the satirical attacks on doctors in Joseph Andrews (1742): Book I, chs 12, 15; Tom Jones (1749): Book IV, ch. 14; Book V, chs 7-9; and Book VIII, ch. 3; and Amelia (1751): Book V, ch. 2, of the first edition.

76. For discussions of the importance of clichés and stereotypes in literature, see Manfred S. Fischer, ‘Komparatistische Imagologie. Für eine interdisziplinäre Erforschung national-imagotyper Systeme’, Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie 10 (1979): 30-44; the special number of Komparatistische Hefte 2 (1980) on ‘literarische Imagologie’; and the volume of essays edited by Günther Blaicher, Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp and Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, Tübingen: Narr (1987).

77. See Anton C. Zijderveld, ‘On the nature and functions of clichés’, in G. Blaicher (ed.), Erstarrtes Denken, pp. 26-41; George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press (1980); and Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press (1987). See also Ruth Amossy, Les Idées reçues. Sémiologie du stéréotype, Paris: Nathan (1991).