The progress of the medical profession in the public esteem may to a great extent be gauged by the position occupied by its members in contemporary fiction, and especially in the novels of the day. The modern novel was the creation of the eighteenth century, which saw the physicians Radcliffe and Mead, Cheselden the surgeon, and the Hunters wax and wane. Yet although Mead and Arbuthnot and others were distinguished among the leaders of literary taste and culture, no medical man is given a prominent place by the novelists of the century if we except Smollett, who being himself a Doctor of Medicine and a naval surgeon, naturally wrote of that which he did know. His sketches of his professional brethren are not very flattering, but then Smellfungus was irascible and somewhat atrabilious. These pen and ink pictures suggest the caricatures of Rowlandson or Gilray, while the brief but graphic descriptions of Fielding are as sober and restrained as Leech's or Du Maurier's drawings in Punch. Some of Smollett's doctors are skilful, some ignorant. Some are honourable gentlemen like Morgan, others lying cowardly curs like MacShane, in whose description Smollett betrays a dislike to the Irish generally; but be they apothecaries, examiners at Surgeons' Hall, spa physicians, or naval surgeons and their mates, they are all drawn with bold strokes of broad satire, as are the non-medical characters in his novels. (BMJ 1903;i:40)