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The Sick Goose and the Council of Health

This is a cartoon by George Cruikshank, satirising patent medicines. The first cholera outbreak in England occurred in October 1831; the cause of the spread cholera was not discovered until 1858. This cartoon has to fall somewhere between these two dates.

In the years before the cholera vibrio virus was isolated and germ theory was successfully adopted by the medical profession, curatives like water therapy (hydropathy), bloodletting, "gout pills" and alcoholic beverages reigned supreme as suitable treatments for disease.

A sick goose is sitting in a chair; a line of animated patent medicine containers, a water pump, and a gouty figure runs from left to right. The various bottles and potions say (left to right)

• I think the poor Goose requires a little of Godfrey's Cordial
• A bottle of Balm of Gilead would revive him
• I should recommend him to sleep in wet sheets and drink three gallons of pump water daily
• Let him have a dozen boxes of Blair's Gout Pills and put his drumsticks in hot water
• His case is exactly like the Earl of Aldborough's so nothing can cure him but Holloway's Ointment & Pills
• Parr's Life Pills I see are the only things that can save him.
• Life Pills! Vegetable Pills, you mean. Let him be well stuffed with Morison's No. 1 & 2.

In the foreground is a tiny figure of a man standing on a book entitled Homeopathy; he is saying, "It is cholera, clearly, and I should prescribe a little unripe fruit — the millionth part of a green gooseberry."