The Dying Patient, or Doctor's Last Fee

A woman collapses against a weeping attendant on a disheveled bed; a second figure cradles her head while bottles and a basin litter the floor. Two physicians—powdered wigs, fine coats, the unmistakable costume of prosperous professional men—turn toward the door. Their expressions mix theatrical grief with frank calculation: the fee dies with the patient. Rowlandson's aquatint line is loose and physical, flesh rendered with the same comic exaggeration he would later bring to his *Tours of Dr. Syntax*. The caption's blunt double meaning—*last fee*—typifies Georgian print satire's class bite: doctors were nouveaux-riche tradesmen dressed as gentlemen, and the joke skewers their mercenary detachment. This tradition of sequential moral commentary, sold cheaply from London print-shop windows, fed directly into the illustrated comic strip.