On the Philosophical Inch: Rabelais, Moderation, and the Peculiar Poetry of Bodily Measurement

It’s a curious thing, the way serious literature can sit happily alongside lavatorial humour. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais – physician, monk, and unabashed chronicler of the digestive tract – offers us not only giants, feasts, and bawdy theology, but also the sort of detail one might overhear in a backroom surgery over a tankard of ale. I was reminded of this today when, in conversation with a perfectly respectable professional, I agreed, with all the clarity of Hippocrates himself, that for the purpose of a stool sample, “about an inch of shit” would suffice.

There it was: the Philosophical Inch, reborn in a modern clinic.

Rabelais would have adored this – not merely because he relished the earthy detail, but because he knew the comedy of precision. In his world, the length of a fart could be measured with the same seriousness as the orbit of Mars, and the precise depth of excrement in a vessel could be the subject of learned dispute between friars. And why not? We moderns are not so different; we just couch our medical instructions in the sterile tones of the NHS website.

In the story, Pantagruel settles the matter with a statesman’s calm: one inch, no more, no less. Too little is miserliness, too much is vulgar excess. Here we find an echo of Aristotle’s Golden Mean – virtue as the middle path between deficiency and excess – albeit applied to the privy. Even the old proverb ‘Give them an inch and they’ll take a yard’ finds its place here, though in Rabelais’ hands, the ‘yard’ is not an abstract measure of human greed but a physical, frankly horrifying escalation of bowel generosity.

There’s a moral under the muck. Pantagruel’s ruling is a parable of governance: proportion matters. Whether it’s the levying of taxes, the pouring of ale, or the offering of bodily samples, the virtue lies not in grand gestures but in measured adequacy. One inch is enough – enough to examine, to diagnose, and, above all, to avoid a public health crisis in the apothecary’s front room.

I’ve always admired Rabelais for this seamless weaving of the bodily and the lofty. He shows us that there’s nothing inherently undignified in acknowledging what we all do, only in pretending that we don’t. The prophets were not above speaking of dung when it served a point – Ezekiel, for example, is instructed to bake bread over human excrement as a sign to Israel (later mercifully swapped for cow dung). The Bible, like Rabelais, recognises that the physical is never wholly divorced from the moral.

So today, as I carried away my little sterile bottles, my mind wandered back to Renaissance France, to the scholarly debates of Pantagruel’s companions, and to the timeless truth that even in matters most earthy, there’s a philosophy to be found. In fact, the next time someone warns me that “give them an inch and they’ll take a yard,” I might just ask whether they have any idea what that really looks like in practice.

Because moderation – in politics, in medicine, and yes, in stool – is a rare and precious thing.

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