Tarrare

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

by aaaaaaaaaaab • 7 years ago

311 72 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

delinka• 7 years ago

"The fork was never found."

kaffeemitsahne• 7 years ago

Was 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

masklinn• 7 years ago

And they're contemporaries.

kodon• 7 years ago

One of the best endings to a story, ever!

jzamora• 7 years ago

Sam O'nella has a great video on him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-rc

StavrosK• 7 years ago

Whenever 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• 7 years ago

This 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/

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/akeVeiq

stavros• 7 years ago

Exactly, 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.

kej• 7 years ago

This 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 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Fran%C3%A7ois_Percy

failrate• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Aw, it was the 18th century: they lost kids all the time.

jackfraser• 7 years ago

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Descendants

TomMckenny• 7 years ago

They couldn't find the golden fork either.

magissima• 7 years ago

A real life shonen manga protagonist.

chabes• 7 years ago

I instantly thought of ShoeNice ..that guy with a YouTube channel that eats random stuff

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg

Be warned, though.. it can be a little disturbing

azhenley• 7 years ago

Oh my... those are some strange videos.

xd• 7 years ago

You should look up the LA beast.

nyolfen2• 7 years ago

competitive eaters have nothing on shoe

rjbwork• 7 years ago

He'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_• 7 years ago

Glad someone else thought of this guy. A modern day Tarrare, I suppose.

cryoshon• 7 years ago

very 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• 7 years ago

Or tapeworms, although that would be pretty obvious in his stool, even in the 19th century.

GeneticGenesis• 7 years ago

I thoroughly encourage everyone to learn more about Tarrare on the This Paranormal Life podcast!

https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-ma...

fallingfrog• 7 years ago

good luck falling asleep tonight everyone

tragic• 7 years ago

Some 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-...

lanius• 7 years ago

Sounds like he had an extremely high resting metabolic rate. Any similar modern medical examples?

jandrese• 7 years ago

I'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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly

vertline3• 7 years ago

Seems he had trouble absorbing calories from what he ate somehow.

jml7c5• 7 years ago

That 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• 7 years ago

Makes 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/Uncoupling_protein

runxel• 7 years ago

What a rollercoaster. Can't believe what I just read.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

I wonder how much of this was borderline normal at the time

hnick2• 7 years ago

All 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• 7 years ago

I 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.

hnick2• 7 years ago

Yes it did mention he had a higher than normal body heat, maybe he had a constant mild fever burning the bugs to death.

Joyfield• 7 years ago

X-Man : Origin

overgard• 7 years ago

Just 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• 7 years 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.

Tarrare

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