A Man Pulling a Cart Past Monsr. Curedent's Dental Surgery

George Cruikshank's etching presents a busy London street front — a Drawing Academy above, Whitbread's Entire ale-house beside it, and in the middle register the surgery of "Monsr. Curedent, Dentist," where a tooth extraction is visibly underway through the open door. A straining laborer hauls a heavy cart past, indifferent to the suffering within. The Frenchified name "Curedent" (toothpick) carries the anti-Gallic class mockery typical of Regency print culture: foreign practitioners were stock comic targets, coded as pretentious quacks. Cruikshank inherited this idiom directly from Gillray and Rowlandson, whose single-plate satirical prints trained British audiences to read sequential visual comedy — the precise grammar that would migrate into the illustrated comic strip within a generation.