Taking Physick

James Gillray's hand-coloured etching catches a dishevelled man—nightcap askew, shirt untucked, blue breeches sagging—recoiling from a cup of medicine with theatrical disgust, a second bottle clutched to his chest. Medicinal vials crowd the mantelpiece behind him. The face is exaggerated to near-grotesque effect, every muscle registering revulsion: a class portrait of the ailing Georgian everyman, not the poor (the fireplace, the slippers, the multiple remedies signal modest means, not destitution), but not the gentry either. Gillray's etched line, bitten sharp in acid then layered with flat wash colour by hand, places this squarely in the London print-shop tradition—Hogarth's moral sequences, Rowlandson's bodily comedy—whose sequential storytelling logic flows directly into the comic strip and the comic book page.