You probably will think of someone with wild hair, white lab coat, glasses, beakers filled with bubbling liquids, a loner, someone who is a mad scientist. These are largely the stereotypical traits that people associate with the image of a scientist.

Of course, we all know that these characteristics aren't necessarily true. Yes, some scientists do fit the bill - think of Albert Einstein here. He has the wild hair, the odd personality and sometimes wore the white lab coat. He even had cartoons created about him, showing his "wacky" side.Yet he was one of the most brilliant minds of his time.

Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. What do you picture a scientist to be like?

Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scientists also faced stereotypes. Caricatures were a large part of life then. These humorous drawings mocked everything from politics to art and even science and medicine.

This cartoon is just one example of the mockery that some people made of medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries. The smallpox vaccine, originally prepared from the lesions of people infected with cowpox (a much milder disease contracted from cows), made many people fearful -- of cow-borne disease, of usurping God's will, of the unknown. This 1802 cartoon shows Edward Jenner, the vaccine's discoverer, administering it, as previous vaccine recipients erupt with cow-like features.

The gentleman in this 1801 cartoon, also by James Gillray, is being treated for chronic pain by "Perkinism," a medical fad from the 1790s to about 1811. Medical history usually dismisses Perkinism as an amusing instance of quackery, chicanery and gullibility. Perkinism was a remedial treatment, done by drawing the pointed extremities of two rods, each of a different metal, over the affected part; tractoration, -- first practiced by Dr. Elisha Perkins of Norwich, Conn.

Many practices of the times were considered to be unorthodox, and their reprocussions often mocked through comedic illustrations such as the ones created by Gillray. To find out more about these unusual methods of treatment, click on the "Quackery" link below.