the truth of truth is not in labor and sorrow, but in joy and happiness...

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages

Put your prejudice aside,

For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,

Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.

Not that I sit here glowing with pride

For my book: all you’ll find is laughter:

That’s all the glory my heart is after,

Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.

I’d rather write about laughing than crying,

For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

(from Rabelais’ prologue to Gargantua and Pantagruel)

“To read Rabelais is to gather, as if from the earth-gods, spirit to endure anything. Naturally he uses wine, and every kind of wanton liquor, to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. For we must be "rendered drunk" to swallow Life at this rate—to swallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad. For in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabelais produces there is not the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of communicating to us is a renewal of that physiological energy, which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied... Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood he bequeaths to us—the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow and daring of it, and its eternal youthfulness. But it is more than a symbol—it is a sacrament and an initiation. It is the sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the ichor, the quintessence of the creative mystery. It is the blood of the sons of the morning. It is the dew upon the paradisic fields. It is the red-rose light, upon the feet of those who dance upon graves. Wine is a sign to us how there is required a certain generous and sane intoxication, a certain large and equable friendliness in dealing with people and things and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for the passionate dreamer. It is a sign that the truth of truth is not in labor and sorrow, but in joy and happiness...

On the seventeenth of September 1530, aged thirty-six, Rabelais signed the matriculation register of the Medical Faculty of Montpellier and six weeks later—though as a general rule an undergraduate had to wait two years—he received his Bachelor’s degree. Even he, however, had to wait until 1537 before he was officially made Doctor of Medicine...Nor was he very long in formulating quite clearly and boldly both for his own future medical practice and for his crowded and astonished audience what he was gathering from Hippocrates and Galen about the art of preserving and restoring human health. The best summary of it would be that in it’s essence it is a particular balance of mind and body to retain in which mind and body reciprocally exert their different energies, the mind naturally taking the initiative.

  In this particular connection Rabelais has a special fondness for the antithesis, Physis, ‘Nature’, and Anti-Physis, ‘Anti-Nature’; and he anticipates several lively modern controversies by the manner in which he emphasizes the importance of ‘Faith’ in the healing art and the value of enjoyment, cheerfulness, happiness, gaiety, merriment, humour, pleasure, mischief, irony, high spirits, exuberance, liveliness, in the practice of all cures of all ills, whether physical or psychic, material or immaterial...The science of working with Nature, not contrary to Nature, that is, according to Physis and against all Anti-Physis, is the grand clue to Rabelais’ attitude as a medical practitioner. He is in fact, and for profound theraputic reasons, prepared to introduce both the Pantagreulian magniminity and the Pantegruelian hilarity into the art of healing.”

From Rabelais, by John Cowper Powys