Dropsy Courting Consumption

From the Manfred Kraemer Collection of Medical Prints and Satires, Harvard Medical Library collection, Center for the History of Medicine in the Francis A. Countway Library, Harvard University

Dropsy Courting Consumption, satirical etching by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), in Tegg’s Caricatures No. 45, a magazine published by Thomas Tegg in 1810

“Personification of Dropsy [Edema] wooing a personification of Consumption [Tuberculosis]. A grotesquely obese man (his hat placed under his plump knees) kneels at the feet of an ugly and bedizened woman, fantastically lean and tall…”— Quote by M. Dorothy George, taken from the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, VIII, 1947

Rowlandson seems to be mocking the romanticized notion of death by consumption common at this time. Death by slow wasting was seen as a gentle, painless process—the glamourous way to go for lovers and passionate poets. The thinness and “delicacy” of the consumptive was also sought after as a sign of beauty among fashionable women. Dropsy, on the other hand, was considered the result of extreme self-indulgence, avarice, and licentiousness. As Dropsy and Consumption court at the entrance to a mausoleum,  another couple, very fat and very thin, promenade in the graveyard. An idealized, healthy human in the form of a statue of Hercules fades into the background.