We all have those days where it feels like we could eat anything in sight, but back in eighteenth century France, there was a man who literally did. Tarrere (or Tarrare, it is likely that this was his stage name and not his real name) was a showman and soldier known for his insatiable appetite—and not just for food.
Tarrere’s appetite for everything began early in life. Allegedly, by the time he was a skimpy 100-pound teenager in Lyon, France he could eat a quarter of a cow in just a day. Unable to support their child’s appetite, Tarrere’s parents kicked him out of the house, and he spent the next few years with vagabonds begging for or stealing food. But his peculiar appetite eventually became his living. Tarrere caught the attention of a traveling charlatan who hired him to be his opening act. That act consisted of swallowing corks, stones, animals and even a whole “basketful of apples,” swallowing them “one by one.”
And, despite eating constantly, by all accounts, Tarrere was thin. But eating everything and anything all time did affect his physicality: his stomach would distend like a balloon when he ate, so the skin around his waist was so loose when his stomach was empty that he could wrap it around his body.
When war broke out, Tarrere served for the French Revolutionary Army. But military rations were not enough for Tarrere. Exhausted, he was sent to Soultz-Haut-Rhin hospital where his insatiable appetite became a point of intrigue for military surgeons. Flabbergasted by Tarrere, doctors experimented on him by feeding him everything and anything: meat pies, plates of grease and salt, sour milk, live puppies and snakes. In one experiment, doctors gave Tarrere a live cat, “which he devoured after tearing its abdomen with his teeth and drinking its blood. He later vomited the fur and the skin,” writes Jan Bondeson in The Two Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels.
With the military well aware of his special ability, Tarrere was assigned a special mission to sneak into Germany, swallow notes he could find and retrieve them from his stool when he returned to French territories. Unfortunately, the Frenchman couldn’t speak any German. He was instantly caught as a spy, beaten and returned to the French (maybe they were scared he would try to eat them?).
Upon his return, Tarrere was getting sick of his constant hunger pangs. He genuinely wanted a cure, so he turned to doctors. At the hospital in Versailles, he was given laxatives, tobacco pills, soft-boiled eggs and anything that doctors thought might cure him. Nothing seemed to work. In fact, his hunger only grew, and he grew irritable. The staff found him more difficult to deal with. He would beg patients for food and sneak out of the hospital to eat garbage. The staff caught him drinking blood samples and reportedly walked in on him eating a cadaver in the morgue. Finally, a toddler went missing in the hospital, and the suspicions immediately landed on Tarrere. There is no record of what exactly happened to the toddler, but Tarrere was kicked out of the hospital for the crime.
Four years later in 1798, Tarrere died of tuberculosis and diarrhea. Doctors wanted to dissect him to see if his body held any clues to his unique disorder; but his body was rotting unusually quickly, so much so, that some doctors were unwilling to work on his corpse. His liver and gallbladder were distended and full of pus, and his stomach was enormous. Doctors did not necessarily learn anything from his autopsy, but they were thoroughly grossed out.
So what caused a man to eat like that? It was unknown at the time, but today doctors guess it was likely a disorder in the hypothalamus, which is the area of the brain that registers when the stomach is full, called polyphagia. Polyphagia leads sufferers to feel constant, ravaging hunger to the point where sufferers like Tarrere will eat anything just to quell it for a moment. Even whole, live animals. The cause is unknown, though it is often linked to diabetes. Still, few recorded cases have been as outrageous as Tarrere’s.
