For the Coil album, see Scatology (album).

In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), healthiness, and diseases such as tapeworms. The word derives from the Greek σκώρ (genitive σκατός, modern σκατό, pl. σκατά) meaning "feces".

In psychology, a scatology is an obsession with excretion or excrement, or the study of such obsessions. (See also coprophilia).

In sexual context scatology refers to sexual acts conducted with human (or other) excrement.

In literature, "scatological" is a term to denote the literary trope of the grotesque body. 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's MacFlecknoe, a poem that ridicules Dryden's contemporary, Thomas Shadwell. Dryden refers to him as "Thomas Sh--," deliberately evoking scatalogical imagery.

See also

• Copralite

External links and references

• Jae Num Lee "Swift and Scatological Satire" UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS 1971 ISBN 0826301967 jstor review
• Bakhtin, Mikhail, "Rabelais and his World"
• Lee, Jae Num. "Scatology in Continental Satirical Writings from Aristophanes to Rabelais" and "English Scatological Writings from Skelton to Pope." Swift and Scatological Satire. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1971. 7-22; 23-53.
• Susan Gubar " The Female Monster in Augustan Satire" Signs, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1977), pp. 380-394
• Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression ()
• Scatology: The Last Taboo
• An analysis of scatology in Malachi 2:3

Further reading

Probably the most comprehensive study of scatology was that documented by John Gregory Bourke under the title Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891). An abbreviated version of the work was published as The Portable Scatalog, edited by Louis P. Kaplan and with a foreword by Sigmund Freud; New York: William Morrow and Company (1994) ISBN 0688132065

• Henderson, Jeffrey The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy 1991 Oxford University Press ISBN 0195066855
• Slater, W. J. review of The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy by Jeffrey Henderson. Phoenix, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 291-293 doi:10.2307/1087300