An apothecary (medical practitioner) riding on a white horse. Etching by T. Landseer, 1831.

An episode in The devil's walk by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, 1799. The apothecary reminds the devil of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, Death on a pale horse as described in the Book of Revelation. "The lank apothecary sits high on his horse, inhaling snuff deeply from a pill box and looking utterly disreputable. He carries a tubular box, possibly for a stethoscope. His horse is a hack, starved, weak, and sickly, pitted with sores, barely able to carry its master. Half-concealed behind him on the saddle is a dead baby (a reference to back-street abortion?) doubtless destined for dissection, and a copy of The Lancet, whose title reinforces this idea. ... A moribund dog convulses in the gutter. In the background a body is borne away on a stretcher; men muffle their faces from the pestilential atmosphere; a coffin-bearer follows. In the midst of this desolation, a quizzical face smirks over the nag's mane: the Devil, sniffing rosemary, approving all he sees. The apothecary holds a paper that reads Accoucheur to the Queen": a reference to Princess Charlotte, whose shocking death in childbirth in 1817 had been followed by the suicide of her doctor. ... " (Richardson, loc. cit.)