Doctors' fees have long been a frequent theme in medical satire, for no one wants to pay for illness and thus any expense can be deemed to be excessive. West's caricature shows a group of physicians who have been more than pleased to have benefited from an epidemic of influenza, and have thus come to pay homage to the disease for increasing their incomes. Some of the medicines they have used, including a barrel of Peruvian bark (quinine) and a bottle of gargle, lie under and on the table. William H. Helfand, from The Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy from the William H. Helfand Collection (1991), p. 64.