Medical Dispatch, or Doctor Doubledose Killing Two Birds with One Stone

Rowlandson's coloured etching shows a corpulent physician—wig, blue coat, cane tucked under his arm—ostensibly taking the pulse of a slack-jawed elderly woman while his free hand encircles a young woman behind her. Jars labelled *Camphor & Dragon* and *Opium* sit on the side table. The title spells out the joke: the doctor exploits a trusting patient to court her companion. Rowlandson's fluid, licentious line descends directly from Hogarth's moral sequences and feeds forward into Gillray's political prints, the German *Bilderbogen*, and eventually the comic strip's visual storytelling grammar of sequential implication and facial exaggeration.