Tarrare

[monkeycantype]

The 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

[contravariant]

Wow, 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".

[tragomaskhalos]

Has Wes Anderson optioned the film rights yet ?!

[mkl]

> yes there is such a thing as a windsurfing champion

I don't think it's that obscure - it's an Olympic event.

[bigdict]

I wish I were that high right now.

[kbenson]

Am 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.

[tsujp]

You are because in 1847, 49 years after Terrare’s death in 1798, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered washing your hands before operations drastically reduced morality would be ignored and ridiculed by his peers for years until he suffered a mental breakdown and was thrown into an insane asylum where he was beaten and died.

Around this same time people still believed that disease was caused by miasma. That is, disease was carried by smell alone. This is why plague doctors in centuries prior had those masks with beaks filled with spices and aromatics; cannot smell the disease? You cannot contract it. Make no mistake though, that was still the common belief until Dr. Jon Snow proved cholera was caused by polluted water and not miasma.

This is a time where if you couldn’t sense something yourself then it wasn’t considered real; its no wonder that mental illness wasn’t (and still isn’t) really taken seriously either in some degree or at all.

[ReactiveJelly]

I think the story is embellished a lot.

I also think, though I might have my historical periods wrong, he lived in a time when stray dogs and cats were considered pests and eating puppies and kittens wasn't the weirdest thing.

[marginalia_nu]

Psychiatry is a fairly young field, and mental illness as we think of it today is a relatively recent concept.

There has always been the idea of things such as madness and stupidity, but it wasn't until the 19th century the notion of systematically cataloguing mental illness got much traction.

[quotemstr]

Is 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.

[kingcharles]

I don't see that he had what we would normally classify as a mental disorder. He had a physical disorder which required him to eat constantly, and the quantities of food he required were not easily available, leading him down a dark path where he ate anything and everything. His survival instinct caused him to eat live animals because he was in such a state he did not have time to kill and cook them and realized it did not matter to his body. I guess at some point his instinct was so strong that he stopped seeing animals (including humans) as beings and simply as food to keep him alive. It's fascinatingly morbid.

[markozivanovic]

You're not you when you're hungry.

[frozenport]

To his credit, he wasn't caught eating the toddler. I imagine he denied doing so, but the rumor persisted.

[Stevvo]

It was doctors and nurses feeding him puppies and kittens. Who are we saying is mentally ill? I doubt he ate a toddler; the guy we have been feeding live animals is a convenient scapegoat.

[userbinator]

Keep in mind that this occurred in the late 18th century. Society was very different from today, or even mid 20th century.

[epolanski]

This article seems more of a legend.

[nmaley]

I 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-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.

[bluedevil2k]

DNP 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-d...

[hotpockets]

In case you are wondering why oc suspected mitochondria, it's because many people believe (though science can't say for certain) that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

[raverbashing]

This ACx article is priceless

> As far as I know, DNP is the only substance to be banned by both the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security for unrelated reasons.

It does still make victims https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00414-016-1378-...

[liamwire]

I came to the same thought immediately upon reading the article. Like a memory leak, but with calories instead of bytes.

[inglor_cz]

I knew a tiny Slovak algebra postdoc who had the same ability(?). After eating a meal, her hands and cheeks would get really hot.

She was about 100 lb and unable to gain weight by any means.

[meroes]

Is there a chance this was his only meal of the day? For example I knew someone who ate once a day at an all you can eat buffet.

[yesenadam]

Gee, whenever I have pizza, I eat a whole large one. It that so unusual?

[vijayrs]

For a more entertaining lesson on Tarrare, see this video by Sam O'Nella: https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc

[cammikebrown]

I’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?

[sajforbes]

If you're not aware, Wikipedia itself has an article on unusual Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Some of them can be quite... weird.

[bryanrasmussen]

well there was just this post 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.

[kebman]

No, 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

[unwind]

Can'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]

There 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

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 .

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

[manuel_w]

> 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?

[dhruval]

There is a popular YouTube personality based out Korea who I suspect has a similar disorder.

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.

[maze-le]

> 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...

[dang]

From the past:

Tarrare 1772-1798 was a French soldier noted for his unusual appetite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195861 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)

Tarrare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084880 - Feb 2019 (72 comments)

[low_tech_love]

Interesting, this could be a built-in feature of HN.

[_HMCB_]

I do wonder if some of this was hyperbole. Even of-the-age accounts have a way of distorting actual happenings.

[umvi]

Could 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?

[divbzero]

This is obviously an extreme case, but more generally I wonder if higher metabolism correlates with shorter life expectancy.

[JadoJodo]

If 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

[quotemstr]

Tessier would have just stolen the fork, I imagine, and reported having not found it. Gold is gold.

[e4e5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery someone very similar, apparently they also ate cats :>

[lom]

I 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.

[baobabKoodaa]

Can 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]

He's not processing it. Mostly pooped.

[jvsg_]

How do eat snakes and lizards whole, and not get sick? Not only this guy seems to be mentally ill, but also superhuman.

[noduerme]

Honestly, for a moment I wondered whether I was reading Wikipedia or if this was some well crafted hoax.

[temp0826]

My first guess would be a massive amount of parasites but they say he was autopsied, no mention of it