Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

A person’s reaction to the story of Tarrare changes with every moment. At first, it’s fascinating. Then, it’s hilarious, before becoming grotesque, and ultimately depressing. Finally, you realise that only one word sums up this man’s history, and that is, quite simply, sad.

There’s vanishingly little we know about the early life of the man known only as Tarrare, and even less that we can verify. Born somewhere near Lyon, France, around 1772, Tarrare grew up with the kind of appetite that even Homer Simpson would deem extreme. Absolutely nothing seemed to fill him, yet this seemed like nothing more than a large appetite until the moment that Tarrare, as a child, could eat his literal bodyweight in a single day, and still need more.

His appetite alone could ruin an entire family in France in the late 1700s. With that in mind, Tarrare was sent away from his home, where he fell in with a group of thieves and prostitutes until he found work as the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan.

This became his livelihood, eating literally anything for a crowd of gawkers, from bottle corks to live snakes to literal rocks from the ground. Tarrare could and would eat anything.

As you can imagine, this line of work took its toll on his health, and he was brought to several doctors who wrote extensively on this medical miracle, of sorts. Despite his pathological need to eat, Tarrare was so thin he was quite dramatically underweight, weighing just seven stone at 17 years old, years after he took his act on the road. Even beyond his eating habits, the medical reports paint the picture of a deeply unwell person.

Tarrare was hot to the touch, sweating profusely constantly. His body odour was disgusting, and it even got much worse after he had eaten. On the rare occasion he hadn’t eaten in a while, his skin loosened so dramatically he could wrap the folds of his abdomen around him fully. Above all, and there really is no more delicate way of putting this, this was a guy who ate a truckload of inedible stuff a day. Anything that you’re imagining, his bowel movements were much, much worse than that.

To this day, Tarrare remains a mystery of modern medicine, but the poor kid’s mental faculties weren’t completely shot. He didn’t have a lot to say for himself, but you spend your entire life with your body telling you that you’re about to die if you don’t eat that letterbox and then see how fucking chatty you are then. There was clearly something going on in his head because when the War of the First Coalition broke out in 1792, he joined the French Revolutionary Army to fight against the coalition of countries all looking to carve a piece of the country out for themselves.

A noble cause, however, his condition reared its ugly head yet again. He just couldn’t survive on military actions and was sent to hospital, where the really disgusting facts turn up.

Doctors examined Tarrare to try and find the limits of his appetite but nothing at all could sate his desperate hunger, to the point where he ate killed and ate a live cat bones and all before throwing up remnants of its bones and skin. Absurdly enough, while no one could understand his condition, when French generals heard about it, they saw a walking, talking container for military secrets.

The idea worked, at first. Or at the very least, Tarrare could keep a box containing a small note in his stomach before he was sent behind enemy lines. He was rumbled, though, savagely beaten after the box reappeared and sent back into France, where he was discharged from the army and sent back to the hospital that he’d been picked up from.

It was here that his desperation to eat became too much for even a military hospital to handle. Depressingly, Tarrare was found fighting dogs for offal outside local butcher’s shops and trying to eat corpses from the hospital morgue.

Most shockingly, a 14-month-old baby went missing from the hospital. Tarrare denied it had anything to do with him, but the absolute worst-case scenario was possible. He was chased from the hospital by the outraged staff and died four years later from tuberculosis.

To this day, we can only hazard guesses as to what caused this monstrous disorder. It was probably a form of extreme polyphagia, but no medical records of his (nauseating) autopsy could come to any kind of conclusion at the time.

It just goes to show that the human body is capable of pretty much anything. For better and for much, much worse.