Scholars at a Lecture

Issued as one of Hogarth's Four Groups of Heads, this crudely executed work depicts the effects that a tedious academic professor (believed to be William Fisher, Registrar of Oxford) has upon his audience. From his isolating perch, a mechanical pedant, his eyes glued to his lecture, "Datur Vacuum" (A vacuum/leisure is granted), reads at his audience. Around him stand his students, who exhibit a variety of responses to the lecture in their caricatured faces; vacuity, indifference, boredom, scorn, amazement, skepticisim, incredulity, drowsiness—every imagineable reaction but real interest.

The Company of Undertakers

As the contrived heraldic rhetoric of this print's caption makes clear, it is a satirical representation of a coat-of-arms for the medical profession. The theme of the escutcheon is not recovery but death. The print is bordered in black like a mourning card; it has ominous crossbones in the bottom corners; and its motto "Et Plurima Mortis Imago" (And many an image of death).

The upper portion of the shield (the field "ermine" above the "nebulous" dividing line) shows three doctors, each with some obvious physical disorder. The center figure ("One Compleat Doctor") with the grim, thick-featured face wearing a clown's suit and a felt hat over a nightcap is cross-eyed. This masculine figure, said to represent Sarah Mapp, a well-know bone-setter of the time, points inarticulately to the human bone she is carrying as a cane. To the right stands a smiling, almost feminine-faced physician. He is supposed to portray Joshua Ward ("Spot Ward"), a doctor with a blood-colored birthmark on one side of his face—thus the shading. To the left stands a well-dressed oculist (his cane identifies his specialty) who has himself only one open eye, which stares erratically upward; he seems to wink ingratiatingly with the other. This figure is believed to represent John Taylor, a charlatan oculist.

Below these figures twelve more quacks huddle together. Nine smell the heads of their canes, which in the eighteenth century, contained disinfectant. Two stare into a urinal to determine the color of the contents. A third dips his finger into the urine itself to taste it. All wear sour, disaffected expressions.

[Excerpts from Engravings by Hogarth, edited by Sean Shesgreen (Dover, 1973).]