In medicine

Medicine

Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 and biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

, scatology or coprology is the study of feces

Feces

Feces, faeces, or fæces is a waste product from an animal's digestive tract expelled through the anus or cloaca during defecation.-Etymology:...

.

Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet

Diet (nutrition)

In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...

 (and thus where it has been

Habitat (ecology)

A habitat is an ecological or environmental area that is inhabited by a particular species of animal, plant or other type of organism...

), health

Health

Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain...

iness, and disease

Disease

A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune...

s such as tapeworms. The word derives from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 σκώρ (genitive σκατός, modern

Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...

 σκατό, pl. σκατά) meaning "feces".

A comprehensive study of scatology was documented by John Gregory Bourke

John Gregory Bourke

John Gregory Bourke was a captain in the United States Army and a prolific diarist and postbellum author; he wrote several books about the American Old West, including ethnologies of its indigenous peoples. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions while a cavalryman in the Union Army...

 under the title Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891). An abbreviated version of the work (with a foreword by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

), was published as The Portable Scatalog in 1994.

Psychology

In psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, a scatology is an obsession with excretion

Excretion

Excretion is the process by which waste products of metabolism and other non-useful materials are eliminated from an organism. This is primarily carried out by the lungs, kidneys and skin. This is in contrast with secretion, where the substance may have specific tasks after leaving the cell...

 or excrement, or the study of such obsessions. (See also coprophilia

Coprophilia

Coprophilia , also called scatophilia or scat, is the paraphilia involving sexual pleasure from feces...

).

Sexuality

In a sexual context scatology refers to the romanticism of fecal matter. Whether in passing admiration, the use of feces in various sexual acts, or simply the act of seeing it. Entire subcultures in sexuality are devoted to this fetish.

Literature

In literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, "scatological" is a term to denote the literary trope

Trope (literature)

A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...

 of the grotesque body

Grotesque body

The grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais' work. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level...

. It is used to describe works that make particular reference to excretion or excrement, as well as to toilet humor. A common example is John Dryden

John Dryden

John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...

's MacFlecknoe

MacFlecknoe

Mac Flecknoe is a verse mock-heroic satire written by John Dryden. It is a direct attack on Thomas Shadwell, another prominent poet of the time...

, a poem that ridicules Dryden's contemporary, Thomas Shadwell

Thomas Shadwell

Thomas Shadwell was an English poet and playwright who was appointed poet laureate in 1689.-Life:Shadwell was born at Stanton Hall, Norfolk, and educated at Bury St Edmunds School, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree, and...

. Dryden refers to him as "Thomas Sh--," deliberately evoking scatological imagery. In German literature in particular is a wealth of scatological texts and references, which includes such books as Collofino

Collofino

Josef Feinhals , aka Collofino, was a German cigar and cigarette maker, patron of the arts, and writer from Cologne. Under his pseudonym, he wrote Non Olet , an 1100-page scatological collection . He was a good friend of Herman Hesse's and assisted Hesse in some of his projects...

's Non Olet. A case which has provoked an unusual amount of comment in the academic literature is Mozart's scatological humour

Mozart and scatology

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart displayed scatological humor in his letters and a few recreational compositions. This material has long been a puzzle for Mozart scholarship...

.

Sources

• Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World
  Rabelais and His World
  During World War II Mikhail Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his...
  
  .
• Lewin, Ralph, Merde: excursions in scientific, cultural and socio-historical coprology. Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-375-50198-3.
• Susan Gubar, "The Female Monster in Augustan Satire." Signs 3.2 (Winter, 1977): 380-394.
• Jae Num Lee, Swift and Scatological Satire. U of New Mexico P, 1971. ISBN 0826301967.