[HN Gopher] Tarrare
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Tarrare
Author : marcodiego
Score : 178 points
Date : 2022-01-16 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| umvi wrote:
| 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?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| There'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.
| b215826 wrote:
| How come Hollywood hasn't turned this into a horror film already?
| Hamuko wrote:
| It would be too unbelievable.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Tessier would have just stolen the fork, I imagine, and reported
| having not found it. Gold is gold.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Yes, 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
|
| [0] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=An-
| we0KnG78C&pg=PA209&r...
| kebman wrote:
| 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
| wyre wrote:
| Can you share a Wayback Machine link?
| ectopod wrote:
| Wikipedia records the history of every page.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Outhouse&action=
| h...
| [deleted]
| supperburg wrote:
| I know several people who eat way less than me and are as fat as
| ticks. The simple fact that calories calories out does. It
| 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...
| jvsg_ wrote:
| How do eat snakes and lizards whole, and not get sick? Not only
| this guy seems to be mentally ill, but also superhuman.
| isomel wrote:
| Why would one get sick by eating snakes or lizard?
| gambiting wrote:
| Well 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.
| manuel_w wrote:
| > 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]
| Hamuko wrote:
| I guess he was in a constant state of starvation, so no time to
| actually slaughter and turn the animal into meat.
| coronasaurus wrote:
| The article had earlier mentions of live animals, I find it odd
| that it didn't bother you until it got to 'cats'.
| virtualritz wrote:
| Probably as odd as people having dogs as pets but eating
| pigs?
|
| People getting upset about animals being eaten alive/dead/at
| all is highly dependent on cultural background. There is no
| logic to it.
| itake wrote:
| Eating live sea food (oysters, gold fish, octopus, etc.)
| isn't that uncommon in most cultures.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I thought a lot of the instances of supposed "live" small
| octupus being eaten that you can see in videos are actually
| recently-killed octopus that spasm when large amounts of
| soy sauce are applied to the tentacles, because of the
| salinity of the soy sauce.
| [deleted]
| maze-le wrote:
| > 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...
| vijayrs wrote:
| For a more entertaining lesson on Tarrare, see this video by Sam
| O'Nella: https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc
| waynesonfire wrote:
| temp0826 wrote:
| My first guess would be a massive amount of parasites but they
| say he was autopsied, no mention of it
| unwind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| caminante wrote:
| For Tarrare, Wiki supposes hypothyroidism or a malfunctioning
| amygdala.
| unwind wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out, I missed that part.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| 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
| spoonjim wrote:
| So what was the actual medical condition he had?
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Polyphagia.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That 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.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Interesting, 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| <_<
|
| 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?!
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-
| story...
|
| also the well known joke about Dick Cheney that he's the
| kind of guy who discusses cannibalism right when he steps
| in the lifeboat.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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
| nmaley wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| markozivanovic wrote:
| You're not you when you're hungry.
| quotemstr wrote:
| 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.
| iqanq wrote:
| mandernt wrote:
| Lots of cultures eat pretty large animals alive. The
| Inuit's entire diet is raw seal meat which has probably
| only just died and is still moving.
| maze-le wrote:
| Or starving... Dogs, cats and corpses is pretty mild
| compared to what happened to people during the "Great Leap
| Forward" or the "Potato Famine" (or any other famine or
| prolonged siege in history)...
| iqanq wrote:
| That is part of the illness. He was not starving.
| OJFord wrote:
| What makes you say that? He weighed 45kg at 17 despite
| the appetite. (Unless you're using an annoyingly rigid
| definition of 'starving' I suppose, that precludes just
| about anyone in any developed country experiencing it; in
| which case yes, fine, true, not the point.)
| crooked-v wrote:
| Somehow he was noticeably underweight despite eating
| prodigious amounts regularly. Who's to say he wasn't
| experiencing the physical and mental symptoms of
| starvation?
| caminante wrote:
| Not comparable :-).
|
| There weren't other "Tarrares" around "surviving."
| [deleted]
| zwkrt wrote:
| Well it is true that weirdness is more of a mental illness
| over time. The more society becomes rigid and codified and
| dense, the less room for weirdness to exist, as there are
| more ways to be transgressive and more people to transgress
| against.
| nrdgrrrl wrote:
| gambiting wrote:
| Stephen Fry's podcast on Victorian England has an episode on
| exactly this - there was no concept of "disabled" person back
| then. Either you were "abled bodied" or not. Someone who
| could work and provide for their family was considered "able
| bodied", even if they were physically disfigured, missing
| limbs, having some mental illness or any other issues - if
| you can be a functional member of the society then you're
| able bodied.
| smortaz wrote:
| tarare 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_ wrote:
| I do wonder if some of this was hyperbole. Even of-the-age
| accounts have a way of distorting actual happenings.
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting, this could be a built-in feature of HN.
| yuchi wrote:
| It is. Click on the "past" link under the story title.
| noduerme wrote:
| Honestly, for a moment I wondered whether I was reading Wikipedia
| or if this was some well crafted hoax.
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(page generated 2022-01-16 23:00 UTC)