Metallic Tractors

James Gillray's aquatint lampoons Elisha Perkins's "metallic tractors" — small brass-and-iron rods marketed in the 1790s as cures for inflammation through galvanic action. A white-wigged practitioner draws the instruments across the grotesquely bulbous, carbuncled nose of a florid, corpulent patient slumped in a chair; both figures carry the exaggerated physiognomy Gillray wielded routinely against quackery and upper-class excess. The patient's reddened, pocked face codes him as a gourmand and drinker — class and body deployed as moral evidence. Aquatint's tonal richness lets Gillray capture smoky atmosphere and flushed skin that woodcut could not. This print sits squarely in the British satirical tradition — Hogarth's sequential moral scenes, Rowlandson's bodily comedy — whose accumulated grammar of exaggerated figure, speech-implied action, and captioned irony passed directly into the sequential panel language of the nineteenth-century comic strip.