From Hogarth to Rowlandson

Medical imagery is a forceful component of 18th-century art. Taken as a corpus, the works of artists such as Hogarth and Rowlandson provide a lay view of some of the contemporary medical developments and of the attitudes held towards members of the medical profession. Demonstrating how medicine and medical practitioners were portrayed, this book places "the art of medicine" of the 18th century in its social, historical and political context, and shows how this, together with a knowledge of the lives of the artists themselves, is necessary for a better understanding of that art in an age when hope was often raised by medical innovation, but all too often dashed. Among the aspects considered are medical images in Hogarth's early satires, death, madness, the innovation of vaccination, fashion in medicine, midwifery and birth, blood-letting, the role and practice of the itinerant quack, surgery, and medicine and morality.