Doctor and Mrs Syntax, with other elderly people, taking laughing gas in the house of a tooth-drawer in Paris. Coloured aquatint, 1820.

1 print : aquatint, with watercolour ; image 10.8 x 18.9 cm

Doctor Syntax and his wife making an experiment in pneumatics

A print in the style of Rowlandson, accompanied by a poem in the style of William Combe, but probably not by either of them for reasons cited by Smith, op. cit.

W.D.A. Smith, 'A history of nitrous oxide and oxygen anaesthesia part III: Parsons Shaw, Doctor Syntax and nitrous oxide', British journal of anaesthesia, 1965, 37: 958-966

British Museum, Catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. VIII, London 1947, nos. 11507-11516 & 11672-11689; also J. Grego, Rowlandson the caricaturist, vol. II, London 1880, pp. 176 & 247-52; also J.R. Abbey, Life in England in aquatint and lithography 1770-1860, San Francisco 1991, nos. 265-7

Wellcome Collection 12086i