Dr. FRANgOIS RABELAIS. H. S. CARTER, M.D., D.P.H. People who use the word Rabelaisian as readily as they would Shakes- pearean or Dickensian seldom know anything about Francois Rabelais and his amazing works. Vaguely they think of his writings as something hardly fit for the light of day, to be sought for furtively in the dark corners ?f antiquarian book-shops. And it is true that these writings are dis- figured here and there by scatological lines and verses and by obscenities resembling those graffiti to be seen scrawled on the walls of public places ; but always in the most overt and jolly manner. So the author is visua- lized as a gross buffoon of the later middle ages whose legacy to humanity a large collection of tap-room anecdotes and smoke-room stories related ' with Bacchic exuberance, rather than one who plumbed the true Well and Abyss of encyclopaedic learning ', and gave a valuable reflection ?f the sentiment and character of his time. The humour of Rabelais is ' not in his occasional indecency. Lord Bacon called Rabelais the Grand ' Jester of France ', but Coleridge wrote beyond a doubt Rabelais was among the deepest as well as the boldest thinkers of his age', and classed him with the great creative minds, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes. He lived during the years of transition from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, and reflected the outlook of more enlightened men, their thirst for knowledge and their impatience with the suppressions and restrict- tions which had long shackled the activities of the human mind. He was an. exponent of early Renaissance humanism in the broadest sense, and revolted strongly, despite the danger, against mediaeval asceticism. Gross he is, but it is a healthy grossness, though he cracks terrible jokes even when arguing on the subtlest questions in ethics, theology, politics, education or on any serious problem of the day. He exposed man's chaotic imagination and its sensualities. Rabelais was essentially a scholar and consorted with the most eminent in all his environments. The quest for knowledge was for him the salt of life. As he was a doctor of medicine, though with him medicine was hardly more than the outer skin, his books are full of the quaintest and strangest kind of medical lore, and as he was a monk and a priest, something of a lawyer, a diplomat, a classicist as Well as a lover of humanity and the countryside, he is brimful of common- sense and surveys the scene with a penetrating and understanding eye. He forged a powerful weapon against the impostures of mediaeval learn- lng and disguised his attacks on the follies of men in a roaring, ranting, drunken, joyous rigmarole in which the vocabulary of his age is too small f?r him, so that he has to invent words and resort to the oddest quirks to Satisfy the exuberance of his mind and his prodigious volubility. Chautea- 267 268 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL ' briand called him the Creator of French prose He was a great genre painter, a great satirist, and a stylist in his own right. His Life. Beyond his extant writings, a little correspondence and a few docu- ments, local registers and deeds to supplement tradition, there is not much to build on. It was formerly held that Rabelais was born at an inn, La Lamproie in Chinon, at the end of the fifteenth century, and was an inn-keeper's son, which belief would naturally be fostered by the riotous enthusiasm of his writings. Did not his hero Pantagruel abolish thirst in the land of the Dipsodes ? His father apparently did own a house in the street of La Lamproie which later was turned into an inn. It was also variously asserted that his father was an apothecary but he was of neither of these trades . Modern researches, chiefly at the hands of members of the Societe des Etudes Rabelaisiennes have disproved earlier assumptions and destroyed popular legends. In fact, his father, Antoine Rabelais, was an advocate, Licencie es Lois, a person of local standing and the owner of several properties including farms and vineyards at La Deviniere, La Pommardiere, Gravot and Chevigny-em-Vallee. The cows that provided milk for the infant Gargantua grazed on the pre Rabelais near Poutille. At Chinon, Henry II of England died in 1189, and with the town is associated the name of Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII. At Chinon too, Charles VII met Jeanne d'Arc in 1429. Francois Rabelais, self-styled Abstractor of the Quintessence and Patriarch of the Sacred Isles, was born in February, 1494, at Fa Deviniere, a few miles from Chinon. He was thus a native of Touraine, home of Balzac and Descartes, the garden of France, flower-laden land of the grape, dotted with castles and manor-houses, and watered by the winding Loire. ' This was what he called his cow-country ', and he praised Chinon as ancient and of great renown. Well-born and well-bred, he no doubt acquired as a boy in this countryside, some of the power of close observa- tion which he never lost and which was sharpened by his long education. He was a younger son and destined for the cloister, upon which he seems to comment in his Fifth book where he writes what makes it probable that he was tonsured before he was nine. He first went to school at the Benedictine monastery at Seuille, and plunged into the study of L,atin grammar, and the memorising of Latin maxims and precepts. He thought little of this early education, for similar schooling made Gargantua a booby, and contrasts it with another system linked with Erasmus, from whose works he was to borrow lavishly- There is a letter to Erasmus extant, but it is doubtful if ever he met the great humanist of Rotterdam. From Seuille he went to the Franciscan Convent of La Baumette at Angers to complete his education before enter- ing the cloister. Here he probably met Geoffroi d'Estissac, later Bishop RABELAIS?CARTER 269 of Maillezais in Poitou, and may have become acquainted with the du Bellay family, his future patrons. Jean du Bellay was afterwards Bishop of Paris and Cardinal. Both these prelates were most useful to Rabelais. His life is shadowy in these early days, but about 1511 he entered the Franciscan monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, and it was here, above all places, that he laid the foundations of his erudition. He must have been here for the next ten years. He was a Friar minor in 1521, and had gained the friendship of Pierre Amy, a scholar from Orleans. Together they pursued Hellenic studies, though Greek was anathema to the Church of that time. The vulgate version of the Scriptures was not to be challenged and the study of Greek was regarded as irreligious. Rabelais and Am}7 wrote to Guillaume Bude, the first scholar in France, then the only rival to Erasmus, whose name is only saved from oblivion by his association with Rabelais. Bude was the King's Secretary and had protection, and was the spiritual father of all Greek students in France. When the convent authorities confiscated the Greek texts of Amy and Rabelais, Bude called ' this action an insult to the muses ? They had to get out, nevertheless, and after consulting the sortes Virgilianae, Amy fled to Orleans, and Rabelais, who had local friends, realising that the monastery was no place for him, obtained, perhaps through d'Estissac, an indulgence from the Pope to move to a Benedictine monastery. Bishop d'Estissac was Prior to Figuge, near Poitiers, and here Rabelais went into residence, perhaps as the Bishop's secretary. It seems to be at this period that Rabelais acquired his great knowledge of botany, so much so, that when he went to Montpellier he was able immediately to lecture 011 medicinal herbs. Rabelais makes the youthful Pantagruel study at Poitiers and visit the other universities of France ; Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Avignon, Orleans, Paris, and this itinerary is surely a reflection of his own travels when attached to the Bishop of Maillezais. This was in the years 1527-1530 and it is almost certain that Rabelais, already a theologian, studied medicine at Paris, and perhaps at other places during this time. Like Villon almost a century before, he 110 doubt heard the winter wind whistle down the Street of Straw. In 1530 he signed the students' register at Montpellier and wore a red gown. In a few months he graduated as Bachelor, but it was not until 1537 that he became Doctor of Medicine officially, though long before that he practised medicine. As a bachelor he lectured on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Ars Medica of Galen, not from the Latin text, but from the Greek. Montpellier followed the Arabic tradition, but Rabelais chose Greek authors. Rabelais was one of the first to translate the Aphorisms of Hippocrates into Latin. There is some record that Rabelais dissected a hanged man, for Etienne Dolet wrote a poem, congratulating ' the subject' upon the eminence of his dissector. Dissection was becoming more common at Montpellier. Dolet, burnt as a heretic in 1546, was a 270 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL scholar, a printer, possibly a murderer and a violent controversialist, ' who was friendly with Rabelais for some years, and esteemed him as the honour and sure glory of the healing art', until they quarrelled over an edition of the first and second books of Rabelais which Dolet printed. Rabelais went to I,yons to get his lectures published.