This print was drawn and engraved by R. Cruickshank and published in Bernard Blackmantle [a pseudonym], The English Spy (Sherwood Jones & Co, 1824).

It is inscribed, “Tom Echo laid up with the Headington Fever or an Oxonian very near the Wall”, and appears in connection with a letter to Horatio Heartly from Tom Echo, who had been rusticated by Christ Church. In it Tom says: “I have only just quitted Æager [sic] Haven and have been very near the Wall.”

A hunting cap hangs over the fireplace, suggesting that the “Headington or Bagley fever” was a result of hunting. The White Hart in Headington hosted the South Oxfordshire Hunt, which met outside the pub and hunted in Marston, while the Old Berks Hunt often went through Bagley Woods.

The meaning of aeger haven and the pun on the word “wall” in Tom's letter is explained thus: “The depôt of invalids; Dr Wall being a celebrated surgeon whose skill is proverbial in the cure of the Headington or Bagley Fever.”

Dr Martin Wall

Martin Wall, who was baptised at Worcester in 1747, was educated at Winchester and then New College, Oxford. He studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital and in Edinburgh, and began practising as a physician in Oxford in 1774. On 2 November 1775 he was elected Physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary and in 1875 Lichfield Professor of Clinical Medicine, and held both posts until his death.

He is listed in St Giles in Pigot's Directory for 1823/4, and probably lived in the part of the street at the south end which lay in St Mary Magdalen parish, as his death notice stated he lived in that parish and his burial was recorded in their register. He was buried in New College Chapel.

Wall was one of the three most important doctors in Oxford in the early nineteenth century: the others were Sir Christopher Pegge (Regius Professor of Medicine 1801–1822) and Robert Bourne (Physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary 1787–1829). G.V. Cox (Recollections, p.133) quotes the following rhyme about them, entitled “The Oxford medical trio” which includes the same pun about Wall as appeared in The English Spy:

I would not call in any one of them all,
For only “the weakest will go to the Wall”;
The second, like Death, that scythe-armed mower,
Will speedily make you a peg or two lower;
While the third, with the fees he so silently earns,
Is “the bourn whence no traveller ever returns”.

Martin Wall has a full entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and a brief one here in Wikipedia.

The English Spy

This was an illustrated serial describing fashionable life in regency Britain. The pseudonymous author (possibly the journalist and blackmailer Charles Westmacott) extended his attention to life and society outside London: more information. The volume with Tom Echo's letter can be read online here.