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Tarrare
- delinka 8y ago"The fork was never found."
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoWas just going to note that it's a very poetic ending indeed. On a more serious note, here is a similar case I found on the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery
- masklinn 8y agoAnd they're contemporaries.
- kodon 8y agoOne of the best endings to a story, ever!
- jzamora 8y agoSam O'nella has a great video on him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-rc
- StavrosK 8y agoWhenever I read articles about things that happened hundreds of years ago, I always think that most of it was made up along the way, so I take it with a boulder of salt. Does anyone know how accurate these sorts of records are?
- close04 8y agoThis thing reads more like a campfire story. I also wonder how much of this is real and how much is the inevitable embellishment added over the past more than 2 centuries. The funny explanation. [0] [1] [0] https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ [1] https://imgur.com/gallery/akeVeiq https://imgur.com/gallery/akeVeiq
- StavrosK 8y agoExactly, most of these claims read like fanciful fabrications of people wanting to tell a good story. Eating his body weight in a day? That's pretty outlandish and easily debunked.
- milquetoastaf 8y agoThe French are known for their...unique appetites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
- jessriedel 8y agoAlso my first thought. For others: > His performances involved the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and other materials. He disassembled, cut up, and consumed bicycles, shopping carts, televisions, and a Cessna 150,among other items. The Cessna 150 took roughly two years to be "eaten", from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material as a teenager, at around 16 years of age,[4] and performed publicly beginning in 1966.[citation needed] Lotito had an eating disorder known as pica. Doctors determined that Lotito also had a thick lining in his stomach and intestines which allowed his consumption of sharp metal without suffering injury Indoor wonder if it's a coincidence both these guys were French....
- claviola 8y agoThis particular claim could be exaggerated, but it looks like most of the story is true: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15afe2/are_these_two_wikipedia_articles_true_or_a_very/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15afe2/are_t...
- empath75 8y agoTrue in the sense that contemporaries reported witnessing such things, but who knows if what they reported was accurate.
- 8y ago
- kej 8y agoThis isn't something that got passed down like a children's game of "telephone"; the outlandish details are present in the original contemporaneous accounts and we have copies of them (digitized even! [1]). So, if it was made up, it was at least made up at the time. However, the person making the claim is Pierre-François Percy [2], chief surgeon of Napoleon's Grande Armée and a member of the Académie des sciences and, later, honorary member of the Académie Royale de Médecine. Inventing a case like this would be wildly out of character. Reflexively dismissing every story from the past is just as fallacious as believing every detail. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=4e0EAAAAQAAJ https://books.google.com/books?id=4e0EAAAAQAAJ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Fran%C3%A7ois_Percy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Fran%C3%A7ois_Percy
- factsaresacred 8y agoFake chews
- failrate 8y ago"After being suspected of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital." The article is unclear on whether they found the missing tyke.
- inherentFloyd 8y agoAw, it was the 18th century: they lost kids all the time.
- jackfraser 8y agoRedundant Array of Inexpensive Descendants
- stcredzero 8y agoRedundant Array of Inexpensive Descendants Here's my evolutionary "Just So Story" for why human kids like to wander away and put things into their mouths. Basically, they acted as food tasters for the group. Makes sense, since the group has invested in them the least, they know nothing important, and in a state of nature, they're likely to die anyways.
- pavlov 8y agoI suspect eating insects also provided meaningful additional nutrition for toddlers.
- stcredzero 8y agoMore evidence the behavior is adaptive!
- rusk 8y agoNot to mention developing the immune system. They always go for the dirtiest thing in the room. Acquire and share.
- MisterOctober 8y ago
- magissima 8y agoA real life shonen manga protagonist.
- chabes 8y agoI instantly thought of ShoeNice ..that guy with a YouTube channel that eats random stuff https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg Be warned, though.. it can be a little disturbing
- azhenley 8y agoOh my... those are some strange videos.
- xd 8y agoYou should look up the LA beast.
- nyolfen 8y agocompetitive eaters have nothing on shoe
- rjbwork 8y agoHe's honestly quite sad now. I'm pretty sure all the terrible shit he's eaten and drank over the course of the years have rotted his brain.
- luc_ 8y agoGlad someone else thought of this guy. A modern day Tarrare, I suppose.
- cryoshon 8y agovery interesting medical case history. i assume that the guy had a metabolic disorder of some kind, although a unique gut microbiome might have been at play too.
- loeg 8y agoOr tapeworms, although that would be pretty obvious in his stool, even in the 19th century.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- GeneticGenesis 8y agoI thoroughly encourage everyone to learn more about Tarrare on the This Paranormal Life podcast! https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-man-who-ate-everything https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-ma...
- fallingfrog 8y agogood luck falling asleep tonight everyone
- tragic 8y agoSome friends of mine [0] actually made a puppet opera based on this chap - and a blast it was too. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2017/jan/26/watch-a-clip-from-the-depraved-appetite-of-tarrare-the-freak-video https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2017/jan/26/watch-a-...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lanius 8y agoSounds like he had an extremely high resting metabolic rate. Any similar modern medical examples?
- jandrese 8y agoI'm not sure he was absorbing so many calories from those meals. It sounds more like he had an extremely overactive digestive tract and just couldn't keep anything inside long enough to digest. Think of it more as a permanent case of explosive diarrhea. His use as a courier suggests that material was going through his digestive tract mostly intact.
- newnewpdro 8y ago"Hyperthyroidism can induce an extreme appetite, rapid weight loss, profuse sweating, heat intolerance, and fine hair. Bondeson (2006) speculates that Tarrare had a damaged amygdala; it is known that injuries to the amygdala in animals can induce polyphagia."
- upbeatlinux 8y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly
- vertline3 8y agoSeems he had trouble absorbing calories from what he ate somehow.
- jml7c5 8y agoThat was my first thought, but this line: >His body was hot to the touch and he sweated heavily, he constantly had foul body odour [...] suggests an fantastically high baseline metabolism.
- kmm 8y agoMakes me think of DNP, a substance which acts to dissipate the protein gradient in our mitochondria, wasting the energy that the mitochondrion would otherwise use to make ATP. The wasted energy is turned into heat, giving its users an elevated body temperature and characteristic sweating. It'd be the perfect dieting aid were it not so toxic. There are proteins in the human body having the same effect, performing some minor functions. Maybe he had a mutation making those proteins very prevalent, essentially making his metabolism very wasteful. Although I don't know if such a sustained fever wouldn't be deadly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncoupling_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncoupling_protein
- justtopost 8y agoDNP has a particularly vile reputation in the fitness community, yet many still use it.
- runxel 8y agoWhat a rollercoaster. Can't believe what I just read.
- agumonkey 8y agoI wonder how much of this was borderline normal at the time
- hnick 8y agoAll that and no mention of food poisoning despite eating offal from the gutters and dung heaps. I wonder if his super-charged metabolism made for a super-charged immune system or it's something we can all get used to?
- hosh 8y agoI was wondering about that too. Seems he still vomited indigestible things (when they gave him the live cat). The autopsy revealed an inner body full of ulcers and pus. Maybe his metabolism was so high, he was burning a lot of it out.
- hnick 8y agoYes it did mention he had a higher than normal body heat, maybe he had a constant mild fever burning the bugs to death.
- Joyfield 8y agoX-Man : Origin
- overgard 8y agoJust a theory (not a doctor), a damaged pancreas could cause insufficient insulin, which would cause food energy not to be absorbed (although I don’t think it explains the other symptoms)
- aboutruby 8y ago> At the autopsy, Tarrare's gullet was found to be abnormally wide and when his jaws were opened, surgeons could see down a broad canal into the stomach. His body was found to be filled with pus, his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers and filling most of his abdominal cavity.
- aaron695 8y agoIf you like this tall tale you might like Baron Munchausen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen