The Tooth-Ache, or, Torment & Torture

Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching stages a dental consultation as low comedy: a stout, grimacing tooth-drawer grips the head of a large, pink-gowned woman patient while his boy assistant proffers pincers and a plate. Two onlookers—an old man and a child with a dog—gawk from the left. The class coding is blunt: the practitioner is a barber-surgeon tradesman, not a gentleman physician, and the patient's bulk and open-mouthed alarm mark her as a figure of gentle ridicule rather than sympathy. Rowlandson, working within the London print-shop tradition that Hogarth founded and Gillray sharpened, used the single-sheet coloured etching as a vehicle for exactly this kind of sequential-readable human comedy—crowded, gestural, narratively complete—that publishers would later page-bind into the comic book.