Easing the Tooth-Ach

A grimacing patient — jowly, open-mouthed, gripping his own knees in dread — sits on a wooden stool while a red-coated tooth-drawer wrenches at his mouth with bare fingers. Both figures are rendered in the exaggerated physiognomy that Gillray perfected: bulging eyes, distorted jaws, comic suffering pushed to the edge of pain. The class coding is period-typical: the practitioner's genteel coat contrasts with the patient's helpless, almost brutish contortion, a hierarchy written in posture and dress. Gillray's hand-etched originals circulated through print-shop windows in London; this 1821 pen-and-wash copy extends that circulation. This tradition of sequential visual exaggeration — single sheet, strong narrative moment, readable at a glance — fed directly into the comic strip format that followed decades later.