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‘Hob and Stage Doctor’, c1812-1817

© 2021 Royal Pharmaceutical Society

Description

Mounted coloured etching entitled ‘Hob and Stage Doctor’ designed by Edward Dighton, etcher anon, printed and published by William Davison in c. 1812-1817.

This caricature depicts an itinerant tooth drawer. It shows a public stage at a country market or fair, on which appears a mountebank or quack doctor in a tricorne hat and full wig. He is pulling out a lower incisor tooth with a tooth key (a specialist instrument for tooth extraction of the period).

The patient/customer is in the normal operating position ~ on the floor and in a headlock! Hob, the countryman, is a smartly dressed patient, wearing knee-britches, and has his hat beside him. Meanwhile the mountebank’s assistant with a clay pipe in a clown’s costume, provides entertainment and distraction. Around the stage is a crowd of men, most amused, some horrified.

The printer and publisher of the caricature, William Davison (1781-1858), was a chemist and druggist in Alnwick, Northumberland from 1802. After 1808, following a partnership with t