14 ms·
Tarrare
- umvi 5y agoCould his body actually produce enough gastric acid to break down all those things he was swallowing? And was he pooping like 5 times a day?
- isoprophlex 5y agoThere's a description somewhere in that wiki page of his constant diarrhea and intense body odor. I guess something happened to his food; i don't think much of it ended up in his bloodstream though.
- spoonjim 5y agoSo what was the actual medical condition he had?
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y agoPolyphagia.
- renewiltord 5y agoThat explains the eating but not the hunger and digestion, does it? It's pretty crazy that he could consume all that and turn it into nothing but foul odor and diarrhoea. I suppose he must have not been metabolizing that much and just producing large amounts of gastric acid that slurrified the food and then released it via faeces. Otherwise, surely he would have gained mass or been particularly energetic.
- vijayrs 5y agoFor a more entertaining lesson on Tarrare, see this video by Sam O'Nella: https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc
- waynesonfire 5y ago
- pablodavila 5y agoAlso check out the Sawbones podcast about it! https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-man-who-ate-everything/ https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-man-who-at... It goes a bit more in depth.
- unwind 5y agoCan't decide if this sounds like the backing story for an episode of X Files, E.R. or Good Doctor. Really weird stuff, and slightly scary in its alien-ness. I'm glad the Wikipedia page includes details of his appearance and how his stomach's skin and so on behaved, since it sounds kind of impossible for all that food to simply fit within a body. It sounds like he must have had his metabolism turned up to 11, perhaps due to some genetic mutation that also caused the other abnormalities found in the autopsy? I know absolutely nothing about medicine, and was a bit sad that the page doesn't include some kind of modern-day analysis/diagnosis, but I guess nobody source-worthy has attempted that, then.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThere is a relatively common (still very rare) genetic mutation that is known to cause constant hunger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prader%E2%80%93Willi_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prader%E2%80%93Willi_syndrome It is the product of a genetic arms race between mothers and fathers over whether a child should take its nutrition from the mother (by nursing) or the father (by eating). Prader-Willi syndrome occurs when the mother's genetic instructions are not appropriately counterbalanced by the father; the converse -- exactly the same genetic deficiency, but coming from the maternal side rather than the paternal side -- is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelman_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelman_syndrome . The same genetic conflict occurs in lions, which is why ligers (lion father, tiger mother) are much larger than tiglons (tiger father, lion mother). > It sounds like he must have had his metabolism turned up to 11, perhaps due to some genetic mutation that also caused the other abnormalities found in the autopsy? Tarrare didn't suffer from Prader-Willi syndrome, since as you note he metabolized all the food he ate. I would speculate that his metabolism was sufficient to cause his hunger in the 'normal' way, and the hunger didn't need its own cause. I would also guess that the enlarged throat and stomach were caused more or less 'mechanically' by his consumption of large quantities of food. A response to his eating habits, rather than a suite of mutations working together to both cause and accommodate a large appetite. In other words, my causal model would go metabolism -> hunger -> large meals -> large throat/stomach
- caminante 5y ago
- dang 5y agoFrom the past: Tarrare 1772-1798 was a French soldier noted for his unusual appetite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195861 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) Tarrare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084880 - Feb 2019 (72 comments)
- low_tech_love 5y agoInteresting, this could be a built-in feature of HN.
- yuchi 5y agoIt is. Click on the “past” link under the story title.
- quotemstr 5y agoTessier would have just stolen the fork, I imagine, and reported having not found it. Gold is gold.
- INTPenis 5y agoI reacted to this line too "The fork was never found.". Yeah he probably took it. I was actually curious if there were any non-digested items inside him. Because people in modern days have even found to have all sorts of crap in their stomach like lugnuts or whatever they've been eating.
- cammikebrown 5y agoI’ve browsed weird Wikipedia articles for over 15 years now, and Tarrare still stands out to me as one of the strangest people in history. Can anyone name anyone stranger?
- kebman 5y agoNo, but I still have a soft spot for their article about the outhouse. It used to be bordering on the humorous, but over time it has become pretty dry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outhouse
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowell there was just this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29960105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29960105 the subject of which was also a related article at the bottom of this one, seems more Tarrare was Domery lite.
- yesenadam 5y agoYes, it's about Charles Domery. I find his wikipedia article rather unbelievable. The mostly likely explanation by a mile seems that it's a joke or a hoax. It seems everything "known" about him comes from this[0] letter to a journal in 1799, purporting to quote another letter. The Tarrare story, likewise, seems to spring from a single article, in that case 1804 - those dates seem strangely close, if they're the two purported weirdest eaters in history—and both supposedly fought on the French side in the War of the First Coalition! I find it strange that the veracity of those reports isn't questioned or mentioned on those wikipedia pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery [0] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=An-we0KnG78C&pg=PA209&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?id=An-we0KnG78C&pg=PA209&r...
- maze-le 5y ago> After some time, a 14-month-old child disappeared from the hospital, and Tarrare was immediately suspected. Percy was unable or unwilling to defend him, and the hospital staff chased Tarrare from the hospital, to which he never returned. Thanks for the nightmares...
- low_tech_love 5y agoInteresting, the man eats animals alive, corpses at the morgue, drinks blood from hospital patients, and all other kinds of stuff, but people around him judged him to be completely sane?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> the man eats animals alive, corpses at the morgue, drinks blood from hospital patients, and all other kinds of stuff, but people around him judged him to be completely sane? Those are all normal things to do when you're hungry.
- isoprophlex 5y ago<_< Did you read the bit where he was suspected of snacking on an 14 month old toddler because his stomach got the better of him? Also... do you feast on corpses when you're hungry?!
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Did you read the bit where he was suspected of snacking on an 14 month old toddler because his stomach got the better of him? People suspect all kinds of things, particularly when they're suspecting them about someone they think is weird. > Also... do you feast on corpses when you're hungry?! Of course, everybody does. You must have heard about the Donner Party? They're not unique.
- CyanBird 5y ago> Also... do you feast on corpses when you're hungry?! There are many recorded cases of parents eating their child's when hungry such as Bengal famine, holomodor, Armenian genocide and other Tsarist Russia famines, so yeah, when driven people can eat not only corpses, but their own children corpses There's also the case of the Uruguayans stuck in the Andes after their plane fell and facing starvation they ate the bodies of dead friends whom where on the plane
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
- kbenson 5y agoAm I the only one that finds it disturbing that it's mentioned that people saw no sign of mental illness in him yet he ate live puppies and kittens, dead bodies from the morgue, and was ejected from the hospital when he was suspected of eating a toddler? Honestly this whole article is nightmare fuel about what a person might become if all-consuming hunger is the driving urge of their life.
- quotemstr 5y agoIs it so surprising that he wouldn't have been considered mentally ill, especially at the time? Imagine someone who's generally affable, who can more or less hold down a job, who speaks in complete sentences, obeys the usual social rules about manners, dress, and speech --- an ordinary guy --- except that he has a habit of eating a variety of unusual objects. Would you consider him eccentric or would you go straight to mental illness? I think we're too eager to medicalize personality quirks nowadays. Traditionally, a mental illness is a set of behaviors or beliefs that impair one's general functioning in society. Mere weirdness doesn't count.
- manuel_w 5y ago> He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Why the live cats? I mean, where's the point of eating them alive and not slaughtering them first?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 5y agoI guess he was in a constant state of starvation, so no time to actually slaughter and turn the animal into meat.
- dylan604 5y agoWhat magical spell must be cast to turn animal into meat? Isn't it already meat just wearing a fur coat?
- mafro 5y agoIt's a magical spell cast with a very sharp knife, and involves a grisly process of removing all material typically considered inedible.
- Hamuko 5y agoI think you'd at the very least separate the fur coat from the meat. Tarrare seemingly ate every part of the cat except for the bones - and then just vomited out the extra bits (like the fur coat).
- coronasaurus 5y agoThe article had earlier mentions of live animals, I find it odd that it didn't bother you until it got to 'cats'.
- JadoJodo 5y agoIf you find this concept intriguing, and also have a fondness for horror novels, Nick Cutter's The Troop[0] might be your cup of tea. [0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571466-the-troop https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571466-the-troop
- b215826 5y agoHow come Hollywood hasn't turned this into a horror film already?
- noduerme 5y agoHonestly, for a moment I wondered whether I was reading Wikipedia or if this was some well crafted hoax.
- temp0826 5y agoMy first guess would be a massive amount of parasites but they say he was autopsied, no mention of it
- smortaz 5y agotarare is also the name of an opera by antonio salieri (of the amadeus movie fame) that takes place, of all places, in the hormoz island of the persian gulf…
- _HMCB_ 5y agoI do wonder if some of this was hyperbole. Even of-the-age accounts have a way of distorting actual happenings.
- jvsg_ 5y agoHow do eat snakes and lizards whole, and not get sick? Not only this guy seems to be mentally ill, but also superhuman.
- isomel 5y agoWhy would one get sick by eating snakes or lizard?
- gambiting 5y agoWell if you think about it, eating a whole live animal means eating the parts you normally don't and shouldn't eat - the excreta still in the guts, the bones, the teeth, the stomach acid etc. Yes you can eat lizards and snakes safely, but usually not whole.
- nmaley 5y agoI knew a guy once with a milder version of what appears to be a similar syndrome. We worked together, and he would go out for lunch and wolf down a whole large pizza. Afterwards, he would get very hot and sweaty. He was not particularly tall and skinny as a rake. He wasn't an athlete, had a sedentary job, yet he was eating 2-3 times normal calorie intake, maybe 5-6K calories/day at least. In all other respects he seemed a normal guy, who to my knowledge did not eat toddlers. There was clearly some medical reason for what was going on, but since he seemed normal in other respects as far as I know he never went to the doctor about it. I'm not medical and have no idea what his syndrome was, but I wonder if it could have had something to do with his mitochondrial functions. See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitoc... I'm not suggesting Tarrare was taking a drug that hadn't been invented yet, but that possibly he naturally had a natural version of the mitochondrial permeability syndrome that DNP induces.
- liamwire 5y agoI came to the same thought immediately upon reading the article. Like a memory leak, but with calories instead of bytes.
- whatshisface 5y agoOne might call it a, "leak."
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago> Like a memory leak, but with calories instead of bytes. What a missed opportunity!
- bluedevil2k 5y agoDNP is a common drug used by bodybuilders to drop fat extremely quickly. Like 20 pounds in 2 weeks quickly. It basically turns your metabolism up to 125% of normal. They describe themselves as being hot and sweaty at all times…though they do also say it destroys their appetite. Fun fact…it was originally developed as an explosive in WW1 and it was observed the workers in the munitions factories were losing tons of weight (and dying). Turns out DNP is a poison. Who would have guessed. https://www.thedailybeast.com/dnp-the-deadly-internet-diet-drug-that-cooks-people-alive https://www.thedailybeast.com/dnp-the-deadly-internet-diet-d...
- supperburg 5y agoI know several people who eat way less than me and are as fat as ticks. The simple fact that calories in calories out does not explain obesity has been cracking over the head of doctors for decades and doctors have resisted addressing it. It’s like a person ignoring being cracked over the head with an oar — sometimes you wonder how they are able to do it. The drooling idiots… I think you could argue they are responsible for killing people at this point. The negligence is astounding.
- callesgg 5y agoIt does explain obesity. The fact that different people burn different amounts of calories due to genetics and epi-genetics and other environmental factors does not invalidate calories in calories out.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoThere is also something called lying. I've seen a study that says that the average overweight person reports around 30-50% underestimation of calories. There is that British show that shows off exactly how much difference there is.
- mkl 5y agoHow much do they drink? Alcoholic drinks contain quite a lot of energy: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000886.htm https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000886.htm
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoLaws of physics exist. You ingest a certain amount of energy (calories), that energy has to go somewhere. It doesn't just disappear.
- version_five 5y agoWell, there is physical activity, as well as base metabolism. Plus you could pass more or less food through unabsorbed, depending on gut fauna and maybe other factors.
- monkeycantype 5y agoThe best teacher at my high school could never eat enough to maintain his body weight - all day long he sipped little juice boxes of protein goop that he took with a grimace from a bear sized stack of pallets against the back wall of his office . He was nearish to seven foot, and in his opinion, didn't have a big enough stomach for the task. As a young man he'd been a skinny pole. During a university science lab he had discovered he has an extraordinary ability to taste tiny concentrations of chemicals, somehow this information got passed on to an ice cream factory, and he got a summer holiday job tasting the ice cream for traces of the 'wrong' flavour e.g. could he still taste coffee after the line had been switched form ice coffee to strawberry. The story went that over three months of eating ice cream all day everyday, he blossomed into a ripped Adonis, and subsequently with his new athletic physique become a windsurfing champion. (yes there is such a thing as a windsurfing champion) But eating ice cream is not the universal delight you and I assume it is. It was a subjective ordeal, a long torturous slog, long days of spoon upon spoon. At the end of the summer, the now champion, couldn't face another bucket and began the lifelong search for something he could endure eating in quantities to satisfy his metabolism
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoHas Wes Anderson optioned the film rights yet ?!
- samstave 5y ago
- contravariant 5y agoWow, what a thrill it must be to be a high school teacher and be able to say to your students "I turned down a job in the ice-cream factory for this shit".
- monkeycantype 5y agoNah - apart from the eating he was a happy one. I went to a high school on the island where Thor from the movies grew up. The good teachers were there because they wanted to surf, smoke a bit of dope and not work too much. The teachers that didn't surf we're miserable creatures, bitter and humiliated they'd had to crawl to the ends of the earth to meet the standard for employability.
- Zamicol 5y agoI wonder if he had celiac disease.
- divbzero 5y agoThis is obviously an extreme case, but more generally I wonder if higher metabolism correlates with shorter life expectancy.
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoCan someone provide a physical explanation in terms of conservation of energy? If he was eating that much, where did all that energy go? Did he really sweat and poop it?
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoHe's not processing it. Mostly pooped.
- dhruval 5y agoThere is a popular YouTube personality based out Korea who I suspect has a similar disorder. https://youtube.com/channel/UCfpaSruWW3S4dibonKXENjA https://youtube.com/channel/UCfpaSruWW3S4dibonKXENjA A 90lb woman who regularly seems to eat 10lbs of food in one sitting. Has 5 + million subs on a channel devoted to eating. So she is turning lemons into lemonade.
- e4e5 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery someone very similar, apparently they also ate cats :>
- lom 5y agoI can’t help but notice that they lived at the same time! Charles was born 6 years later and died 2 years later. Since he was on the Russian side, fighting against the french, where Tarrare was, they should’ve organized a ‘who can eat more’ battle, and winner wins the war. Would’ve saved lots of lives.
- igna_z_4 5y agoHacker News? I'm aware that this is a community driven site but it's becoming more and more a place for discussing generally interesting things. I'd prefer to keep the focus on IT topics and comments with informationial character. Particurly I don't think this should be a forum for chats and personal anecdotes.
- unixhero 5y agoMacabre and bizarre. I had to stop reading, but insanely interesting.