Richard Rock was a well-known doctor

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

 in eighteenth century London. Originally from Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, he was depicted by William Hogarth

William Hogarth

William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...

 in the fifth scene of his 1731/2 satirical and moralistic series, A Harlot's Progress

A Harlot's Progress

A Harlot's Progress is a series of six paintings and engravings by William Hogarth. The series shows the story of a young woman, Mary Hackabout, who arrives in London from the country and becomes a prostitute...

, where he stands in dispute with notable French doctor John Misaubin

John Misaubin

John Misaubin was an 18th century Huguenot French and British physician and "quack."He was born in Mussidan, in the Dordogne in France. His father was a Protestant clergyman who later preached in the French Church in Spitalfields. He qualified as a medical doctor in Cahors. As a Huguenot, he...

 beside the dying body of their patient, Moll Hackabout. The contrast between Rock (German, short and fat) and Misaubin (French and gaunt) is intentional. Misaubin is easily recognised by his notably tall and thin appearance, but the second doctor was harder to identify with certainty, so Hogarth added his name on a slip of paper on the stool to the lower right of the scene in later printings.

Hogarth also included Rock in his 1738 engraving, Morning, the first of series entitled The Four Times of the Day, selling his medicines in Covent Garden

Covent Garden

Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...

. Rock was known for selling a pill for venereal disease.

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...

discusses Rock and his physical appearance in Letter LXVIII of his 1760 work, The Citizen of the World.