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Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities

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The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

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Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore the humour in François Rabelais’s fictional works using approaches drawn from the medical humanities and phenomenology. It argues that two key aspects of the modern medical humanities, multidisciplinarity and therapeutic reading, were familiar parts of medical practice in early modern Europe, and that there are similarities between early modern and modern understandings of the processes and functions of laughter in healthcare. Phenomenology’s emphasis on individual perception and embodiment in the world is applied to depictions of the sick body in Rabelais’s fiction and to our reactions to it. The chapter considers examples of humour from Rabelais’s texts to investigate how they engage with three concerns of the medical humanities: the application of medical knowledge, the relationship between doctor and patient and between patients, and the function of the text as a therapeutic artefact. It is argued that abjection links these three concerns, and that a humorous presentation of and response to abjection leads to affiliative humour, drawing the reader into a close bond with the sick in the texts in recognition of the shared experience of embodied life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For discussion on the contested date of Rabelais’s birth, see Huchon, Rabelais, 31–33.

  2. 2.

    References to Rabelais’s works: Pantagruel (1532?), Gargantua (1534/35?), LeTiers Livre (1546), Le Quart Livre (1548 (incomplete), 1552), and Le Cinquiesme Livre (1564) are taken from Rabelais, Œuvres complètes. Translations are from Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. For a summary of the various opinions about the authorship of Le Cinquiesme Livre see Huchon’s notes to the above edition, 1595–1607 and Cooper, ‘L’Authenticité du Cinquiesme Livre’.

  3. 3.

    Voltaire, Letters on England, 108.

  4. 4.

    Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, 150.

  5. 5.

    Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 146.

  6. 6.

    Bergson, Laughter, 4.

  7. 7.

    Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 20.

  8. 8.

    Aristotle, Poetics, 9.

  9. 9.

    Bergson, Laughter, 5.

  10. 10.

    Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 97.

  11. 11.

    Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 394.

  12. 12.

    Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 4.

  13. 13.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 146–47.

  14. 14.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxxiv.

  15. 15.

    Saunders et al., ‘Introduction’, 4.

  16. 16.

    Carel, Illness, 27.

  17. 17.

    Carel, Phenomenology of Illness, 27.

  18. 18.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 370.

  19. 19.

    For more detail on all of these aspects of Rabelais’s professional medical life, see Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine, chapters 3 and 4; Huchon, Rabelais, chapter 4.

  20. 20.

    Bates and Goodman, ‘Critical Conversations’, 3–13.

  21. 21.

    Crawford et al., Health Humanities, 2.

  22. 22.

    Evans and Finlay, eds., Medical Humanities, 8.

  23. 23.

    Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 87.

  24. 24.

    Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine, 159; Screech and Calder, ‘Some Renaissance Attitudes to Laughter’, 216; Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire.

  25. 25.

    Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 16.

  26. 26.

    Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 94–95.

  27. 27.

    du Pré, Humor and the Healing Arts, 19; Dubb, ‘Humour and Laughter in Medicine’, 2–3; Calman, A Study of Story Telling, 40; Keith-Spiegel, ‘Early Conceptions of Humor’, 5.

  28. 28.

    Dubb, ‘Humour and Laughter in Medicine’, 1–3.

  29. 29.

    Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 124–25.

  30. 30.

    Calman, A Study of Story Telling, 41.

  31. 31.

    Finlay and Ballard, ‘Spirituality as an Integral Part of Healthcare’, 141.

  32. 32.

    Martineau, ‘A Model of the Social Functions of Humor’, 110.

  33. 33.

    du Pré, Humor and the Healing Arts, 183.

  34. 34.

    du Pré, Humor and the Healing Arts, 4.

  35. 35.

    Hallett and Derks, ‘Humour Theory and Rabelais’, 137–40.

  36. 36.

    Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3.

  37. 37.

    Bleakley, Medical Humanities and Medical Education, 5.

  38. 38.

    Parkin, Interpretations of Rabelais, 17; Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing, 140.

  39. 39.

    For theriac see: Palmer, ‘Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice’, 108, and Szczeklik, Catharsis, 22–23.

  40. 40.

    On galbanum see: Avicenna, Canon, 2.472; Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.83; Gerard, The Herball, 1056, 1058; Pliny, Natural History, 24.13. On asafoetida see: Avicenna, Canon, 2.58. On castoreum see: Avicenna, Canon, 2.207; Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 2.24; Pliny, Natural History, 8.47.

  41. 41.

    Rabelais, Pantagruel, 273; Screech translation, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 88.

  42. 42.

    On euphorbia (or spurge) see: Avicenna, Canon, 2.425; Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 4.164, Gerard, The Herball, 1180; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 9.9.5.

  43. 43.

    Pliny, Natural History, 27.46, 13.35; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 9.20.2.

  44. 44.

    Williams, ‘Sick Humour’.

  45. 45.

    For more on Rabelais’s criticisms of the harm done by ill-educated doctors in sixteenth-century Europe, see my forthcoming article ‘Rabelais, the History of Medicine, and Medical Humanism’.

  46. 46.

    Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xii.

  47. 47.

    Brown, The Pox, 9.

  48. 48.

    Arrizabalaga et al., The Great Pox, 24; Brown, The Pox, 1; Quétel, History of Syphilis, 10.

  49. 49.

    Quétel, History of Syphilis, 15.

  50. 50.

    Hayden, Pox, 5.

  51. 51.

    Losse, Syphilis, 11.

  52. 52.

    Brown, The Pox, 24–25.

  53. 53.

    Losse, Syphilis, 13.

  54. 54.

    Brown, The Pox, 20.

  55. 55.

    Brown, The Pox, 4; Hayden, Pox, 58.

  56. 56.

    Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.

  57. 57.

    Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 6.

  58. 58.

    Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23.

  59. 59.

    Carman, Merleau-Ponty, 10.

  60. 60.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 379.

  61. 61.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 205.

  62. 62.

    Notable works on narrative medicine include: Charon, Narrative Medicine; Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Greenhaigh and Hurwitz, Narrative Based Medicine; Kleinman, The Illness Narratives.

  63. 63.

    See for example works by Bolton, Lepore and Smyth, and Pennebaker.

  64. 64.

    Crawford et al., Health Humanities, 56.

  65. 65.

    Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing, 145–46.

  66. 66.

    Carman, Merleau-Ponty, 188.

  67. 67.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 244.

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  1. Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Alison Williams

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  1. Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Daniel Derrin

  2. Department of History, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Hannah Burrows

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Williams, A. (2020). Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities. In: Derrin, D., Burrows, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_15

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