SOURCE: Wagner, Peter. “The Satire on Doctors in Hogarth's Graphic Works.” In Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, pp. 200-25. London: Routledge, 1993.

In the following essay, Wagner studies popular attitudes toward the medical profession using the various representations of doctors in Hogarth's graphic texts.

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My interest in this chapter is in the ways Hogarth appropriates and handles various forms of popular texts and codes while creating his own ‘texts’. By analyzing the intertextual and intermedial nature of what are essentially palimpsests made up of visual and verbal crossings, I hope to shed some light on an aspect of popular attitudes towards doctors and, more specifically, of the mentalité behind the relations between patients and medical men and women.

In their recent study of doctors and doctoring in eighteenth-century England, Roy and Dorothy Porter dedicate an entire chapter to...