Marriage a-la-mode. [graphic] / Plate III

The scene is the interior of a dispensary with the Viscount sitting in a chair, his child-mistress at his knee. The young girl holds a handkerchief to her mouth as if to hide a sore. With his right hand he holds a pill-box out to the doctor; with his left, he threatens him with his raised cane. A large, well-dressed woman looks angrily at the young man and opens a knife, while the quack polishes his glasses, at his side a skull on the table. The room contains numerous medical and scientific objects, including machines for straightening shoulders and for drawing corks, a dried crocodile, a narwhal's tusk, two mummies, a skeleton, and two pictures, one of a two-headed hermaphrodite and the other an anthropophagi (see Paulson).

After the painting "The Inspection" in the National Gallery, London