Lady-Physicians

This wood engraving satirizes the emerging professionalization of women in medicine in Victorian Britain. Du Maurier depicts a female physician attending a male patient. The cartoon exaggerates both the woman doctor and the scenario of cross-gender medical intimacy. The print exemplifies mid-nineteenth-century satirical journalism, a tradition descending from Gillray and Rowlandson. Visual caricature and exaggeration were tools of graphic satire that functioned as a mass medium shaping public opinion before the rise of modern comics.