Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Medical Treatment, Disease, Analogy

Institutions mentioned:

Admiralty

    Responds to the call by William Bowles (commander-in-chief at Portsmourth) for the 'severest measures' to be taken to crush the 'rising spirit of insubordination in the British Navy'—his reaction to a recent mutiny on the HMS Princess Royal. Ironically imagines what a fine doctor Bowles would have made: he would doubtless have approached an 'eruptive complaint' such as small-pox by suppressing the eruption, thus killing the patient. If, as a doctor, Bowles had 'taken his severest measures' against the causes rather than the symptoms of the eruption, Punch begs his pardon.