How many times when we were hungry did we say to ourselves “I’m so hungry!”? But perhaps it would be more correct to say that one is “hungry like Tarrare“. We are not talking about a fictional character like giants Gargantua and Pantagruel of the well-known French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelaisbut of a historical figure with an equally incredible appetite. His monstrous hunger was told by Dr Baron Percy who was treating him on the Journal de Médicine, chirurgie et pharmacie of 1804.
It can be said that Tarrare was the most incredible polyphagus in known human history, because he truly ate everything, and never seemed to be truly satisfied. His specific medical condition was never clear, but it was suspected that he suffered from hyperthyroidism and hyperphagia. The last time he showed up at the hospital, in 1798, Tarrare said he had swallowed a silver fork, and he was convinced that this was the cause of all his ailments. The autopsy that followed his death, however, which came a few days after his hospitalization, did not reveal any fork, but only an abnormal condition of the internal organs that was still indefinable for medicine.
Who was Tarrare: childhood and youth as a freak
Let’s start by saying that his baptismal name is still unknown, but that he became known by the name of Tarrare, probably because he was born in the village of the same name near Lyon where he was born in 1772.
Since he was a child he showed an uncommon hunger, which only increased with puberty. By the time he was 14, the situation had worsened, and the family, who were farmers and poor, no longer knew how to feed him. So it was that his parents kicked him out, and after begging and stealing with a gang of young thieves for a few months, he had a brilliant idea: in Lyon there were freak showsand his enormous hunger could earn him some money and a roof over his head. So he joined one of the traveling fairs that would pass through many French cities, and during his performances he asked spectators to throw anything at him, and he would eat it. And that’s what he really did: people threw at him stones, corks, ribbons, apples and potatoesand he gobbled it all up. One day there was even someone who thought of bringing him an ox that weighed as much as him, and he ate that too. It might seem incredible that this man, despite how much he ate, was really thin: indeed he weighed just over 50 kiloshe was frail and with the face of a frail boy surrounded by a row of blond hair. Very far from what one would expect.
After his shows he complained of ailments which soon resulted in attacks of colic, and he was now a regular patient at theHotel Dieu of Paris, where doctors offered him laxatives to try to evacuate that poor intestine. There was nothing to be done, however: once he recovered, the boy returned to his shows, and the story began all over again. One day Tarrare even tried to swallow the pocket watch of the surgeon Giraud, and so the medical team – tired of this story – tried to scare him by saying that the only way to cure his polyphagia was to do a surgery. They agreed and pretended that everything was ready: the team was in agreement, the operating table was ready, scalpels and tools too… Tarrare was so afraid that he quickly got off the stretcher and ran out of the hospital, as they said the doctors. He never returned to the Hotel Dieu.
Tarrare soldier ends up as a guinea pig in the military hospital
Tired of those constant visits and exits from the hospital, Tarrare tried to go as straight as he could for some time. When the First Coalition War broke out, the young man he enlisted in the Armée Révolutionnairebut he soon realized that it had been a mistake. In fact, the rations intended for the soldiers were insufficient to appease his proverbial fame, so much so that the boy tried to corrupt some of his fellow soldiers by doing the worst jobs in exchange for part of their food. But even that wasn’t enough, and so he was soon so debilitated that he had to be admitted to the Soultz-Haut-Rhin military hospitalon the French-Swiss border.
The doctor treated him there Courvillewho had already met him at the Dieu in Paris, and who extended the patient’s hospitalization as much as possible to better study his condition. Courville decided that Tarrare should receive one quadruple portion compared to normal patientsbut not even this offer was enough: in fact the boy was caught several times rummaging through the bins behind the canteen and in the pharmacy with his hands in his poulticeshealing pastes based on herbs and flowers to be applied to the skin. One day, Courville said, the patient had gotten his hands on one of the cats found in the facility’s garden and ate it without too many problems. This also happened with the lizards and small snakesand the doctors who were treating him even tried to give him one live eel to eat, which he did without much trouble.
Among the many experiments, he was offered a dinner for 15 German workerswith two enormous meat pies and four gallons of milk, which the diner finished alone and then fell asleep heavily, swollen like a hot air balloon and with a heavy, fetid sweat that drove away anyone who heard it.
The brief experience as a spy and death
Doctor Courville decided to do an even more bizarre experiment, and made him swallow one cylindrical wooden box with a piece of paper inside to test whether the parchment was still intact after defecation. The experiment had a positive result, and so did the general Alexandre de Beauharnais it was thought of use Tarrare as a war spy.
He swallowed a second cylinder and, dressed as a peasant, was sent on a simple mission into enemy territory, where – not speaking German – he was immediately intercepted by a Prussian vanguard a few kilometers from Landau who beat him a few times before sending him back to Soultz Hospital. The boy, then in his early 20s, was so traumatized by the experience that he told doctors he wanted to be healed. Everything was tried: acidic drinks, laudanum based, tobacco pills, oysters and other concoctions…but nothing could quench that incredible hunger.
There were rumors among hospital staff that he even drank the bled blood of some patients, who had begun to avoid him. One day a baby of a few months disappearedand Tarrare was suspected (without any clear evidence) of having eaten it, and so he was removed from the structure in 1794.
Four years later Doctor Percy found the boy, now 26 years old, in Versailles hospital, with a serious tuberculosis. The young man, who was no longer hungry, thought he was sick because of a silver fork which he claimed to have swallowed, but the clinical picture was clear and he died a few months later.
During the autopsy numerous internal inflammations were discovered (it was full of pus), and the stomach – which like almost all abdominal organs was larger than average – was almost entirely covered in ulcers. Doctors at the time suspected a possible allotryophagya medical condition in which the person also eats things that are not included among foods which can occur in conjunction with some mental illnesses. However, this theory quickly faded because it did not explain how Tarrare could eat such large quantities of food or why he remained so thin. Even today, the patient’s clinical picture is still unclear, but the most probable hypothesis is that he suffered from hyperthyroidism and hyperphagia (eating disorder characterized by an excessive and uncontrolled increase in appetite which can lead to compulsive consumption of food even in the absence of real hunger).
In any case, during the autopsy one thing was established: there was no fork in the belly of the unfortunate Tarrare.
