May 23, 2016 • 28 mins
Insatiable hunger completely dominated every aspect of this French man's existence in the 18th century. His life took a series of twists and turns, but his condition was never truly diagnosed or cured.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we are going to talk about a subject that was
requested by listener Nathan. Uh. And this is a story
(00:22):
that will come up. You'll see it kind of been
online article sometimes as this tale of gluttony that's, you know,
just amazing, and it is that, but really at its heart,
it's a medical mystery and it's really quite tragic at that. Uh.
Some of this, also, we should warn you feature some
gross ish bodily function stuff, so be warned. Uh. There's
(00:44):
also a little bit that might be tricky if you
are sensitive to animals being harmed. I know I am.
So we're not gonna get to graphic with it and
we're not going to linger on that, but we are
going to mention the details of it in that regard.
But if you are very, very squeamish, this may not
be the episode for you. And before we start talking
about the actual person will be discussing, we're going to
(01:04):
talk for just a minute about polyphagia. So this is
sometimes also called hyperphagia, which is basically terms I mean
excessive hunger or excessive eating or really markedly increased appetite.
These can be, uh regardless of which term you're using,
an indicator of diabetes because the body isn't properly converting
glucose into energy, so the body remains hungry and it
(01:27):
keeps seeking the energy it needs from additional sustenance, so
you you eat more and more you have a ongoing
insatiable appetite. But that is not the only thing that
polyphagia is linked to. It can also be um part
of any number of other triggers and bigger issues, including
stress and depression, hyper thyroidism, as well as medical conditions
(01:49):
such as Kleine Levin syndrome and Praytor Willie syndrome. But
some cases of this are really extreme. So we're not
talking about eating a lot because you've started really working out,
or eating a whole pie because you are upset about something.
These are really cases where the person's hunger can never
be stated in the volume and the nature of the
(02:09):
things that the person is eating really become pretty mind boggling.
So we are talking today about tore or tarre if
you want to english it up a little bit more.
Who was a French gentleman and most of the information
that we have about him is from an eighteen o
five publication of geenal de medicine in a piece entitled
Memoir la poe uh and this case study was written
(02:33):
by Pierre Francois Percy, who examined her are several times
throughout the man's life. So just to give a little
bit of background, because I mean, often when we're reading
old medical papers sometimes there's some questionable stuff in them
from before the days of evidence based medicine. So we
just want to establish this guy's credentials are a little
(02:55):
bit Pierre Francois Percy was this respected surgeon in France
and the late eventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. He
served as an army surgeon starting in seventeen eighty two,
and he invented a trolley that would carry medical supplies
and nursing staff directly onto battlefields for treatment of wounded
soldiers without having to take them away to another location.
(03:16):
He also invented the surgical quiver, so this was a
carrying kit that held a tourniquet and eleven different surgical
instruments which a surgeon could wear on his shoulders, free
up his hands, have all that stuff easy to access. Yeah,
I wanted to find a picture of one, and I
didn't manage to do so. I'm sure there's gotta be
one out there, but I would love to see it. Uh.
Percy was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor
(03:38):
in eighteen o four, and he only left his military
medical career when he developed chronic eye inflammation that just
made it not really feasible to stay basically on active
duty as a doctor. Uh. He then went on to
oversee health inspection services and to teach at the Faculty
of Medicine in Paris, and after his death he was
called the father of military surgeons. And thanks to Monsieur Prescy,
(04:00):
we have medical notes on the man known as Tarar,
but we still have huge gaps in our knowledge on
this unusual patient's background. Tarar was born in Lele, France
in the seventeen seventies, and we don't know his name
at birth or really anything about his family, because he
left home when he was very young. This allegedly was
because his parents were unable to provide food for him
(04:24):
and they turned him out of the family home. The
apocryphal story of the origin of his name suggests that
it's basically a nickname after a sort of an amato
poetic phrase that was used in France at the time,
which kind of went and that referred to a big
explosions to sort of like saying kaboom uh. And the
(04:45):
explosions in this explanation were his constant bursts of flatulence.
So to survive on his own as a boy, Tarar
would beg He would sometimes even steal, but he was
really never able to gather enough food to key uh
himself filled up. He was from a very young age,
could never really meet his appetites needs, and by the
(05:08):
time he was seventeen, he weighed barely a hundred pounds
or forty so very lean. He could also at this
point allegedly eat as much as a quarter of beef
in a day at this point, so that is literally
one quarter of the beef animal. If you purchase a
quarter of beef today, it's usually estimated as being somewhere
between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty
(05:29):
pounds that's fifty four to sixty eight ms. So once
you lose some of that weight to the inedible sections
like the bone, etcetera. He was basically capable of eating
just about the equivalent of his own weight in a
given day. Eventually, he joined up with a group of
traveling entertainers and he was able to put his unending
hunger to work. As part of the show, he would
(05:50):
challenge spectators to basically beat him enough to be false,
so he ate huge quantities of apples and mere minutes.
He would even consume things that weren't food, like corks
and flints. And he enlisted as a soldier with the
French revolution Army during the War of the First Coalition
against Austria and Prussia, and in an effort to ensure
(06:10):
that he was getting enough food, Tarar would do all
of the work of his fellow soldiers in the battalion
in return for portions of their rations, usually quite a
lot of them. But it simply wasn't enough, and his
energy really lagged. He became very weak and ill, and
he was eventually admitted to a military hospital in suits.
The medical staff at this military hospital immediately increased his
(06:33):
rations fourfold, and while he was in the hospital, he
would also eat any food that other patients had been
unable or unwilling to eat. He managed to get some
kitchen scraps as well. But even though none of this
was enough, he continued to be hungry all the time,
so much so that he would break into the hospital
pharmacy and eat anything that he could get his hands on.
And we're going to talk next about some additional treatment
(06:55):
that he had at the military hospital and how his
examination by doctor actually led to a strange and rather
brief career move. But first we're going to have a
word from one of our sponsors. Going to get back
(07:15):
to our story. It was during this treatment at a
military hospital that Sir met, among other doctors, Baron Percy.
And this is the man who serves as the primary
source of information about him. He penned he being Dr
Percy penned a very thorough and pretty unsettling description of
the patient in his memoirs on the case, and it
(07:37):
reads his cheeks were sallow and furrowed by long and
deep wrinkles. On distending them, he could hold in them
as many as a dozen eggs or apples. His mouth
was very large, He had hardly any lips. He had
all his teeth. The muellers were much worn away, and
the color of their enamels streaked like marble. The space
between the jaws, when they were fully separated, measured about
(08:00):
four inches. In this state, with the head inclined backwards,
the mouth and esophagus form erectilinear canal into which a
cylinder of a foot in circumference could be introduced without
touching the palate. He often stanked to such agree that
he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.
He was subject to a flux from the bowels, and
(08:20):
his dejections were fetted beyond all conception. When he had
not eaten copiously within a short time, the skin of
his belly would wrap almost around his body. When he
was well satiated with food, the vapor from his body
increased his cheeks and his eyes became a vivid red.
A brutal somnolence, and a sort of habitude came over
(08:41):
him while he digested. He was in this state troubled
with noisy belchings, and made in moving his jaw some
motions like those of dead lutition. Another quote from stere
of Percy about Tara goes like this, let a person
imagine all that domesticated and wild animals, the most filthy
and ravenous are capable of devouring, and they may form
(09:03):
some idea of the appetite as well as the wants
of Terrara. And this likening of Tarar's tastes to the
most filthy and ravenous animals is due to the fact
that he developed a fondness for both rotten meat and
very very fresh meat. This is where it gets a
bit difficult for animal lovers in the crowd, including frankly,
(09:23):
both of us. So great and voracious was this man's
appetite that he eventually took to eating live animals in
an effort to sustain himself. He is said to have
eaten a live cat in front of an army physician
named Dr Laurence, and much in the way that a
wild animal would was the way he approached eating this cat,
and then afterward he produced a hairball of the cat's fur,
(09:46):
and as part of his uh treatment there at the hospital,
they were kind of testing what sort of things he
would eat, so cats were not his only live diet.
He also would eat dogs, snakes, eels, and lizards. He
was apparently very fond of serpents, swallowing them whole without chewing.
There's one description that describes him as sort of crushing
(10:07):
the head with his jaw and then swallowing the whole thing.
The doctors at the military hospital were so completely fascinated
with Tarar that they concocted massive meals to feed him,
as they observed he was once spent a feast besides
that you might prepare for more than a dozen men,
and he devoured it all in its entirety. At one meal,
(10:27):
he downed four gallons of milk in addition to two
full sized meat pies. You ever heard about challenges or
people try to chug a single gallon of milk in
one go. You know, it's incredibly difficult and frankly dangerous,
so please don't try it. So four at once on
top of a very substantial meal is truly astonishing. Yeah,
it's kind of one of those moments where, when you
really think about it, it kind of can turn your stomach,
(10:48):
So don't think too hard on that. Uh. And when
he would eat these immense portions, Tarar's belly, all that
skin that Percy had written could wrap around him. When
he hadn't eaten, would become distended, and he would, as mentioned,
sleep for a while, very very deeply as he digested.
This is one of those things that seems so far
(11:09):
fetched that like part of me wonders, this is a
giant hoax perpetuated by like multiple physicians at the same time.
But like, there's so much primary source documentation describing him
that that seems like it would have been a colossal feat. Yeah.
I mean, we don't have a ton compared to some things,
(11:29):
but for medical issues of an era, for one patient
to have so many people kind of involved in commenting
on it, it's fairly substantiated and completely horrifying. But uh, yeah,
it's I can't imagine what it would have been like
for a bunch of doctors to be puzzling out what
(11:51):
the heck is going on with this person and trying
to come up with ways to test it. Yeah, especially
given how relatively especially given where we were in medical
history basically so, Sarra's unique condition unsurprisingly intrigued both the
doctors and the military quite greatly. They tested and steadying him,
(12:14):
and eventually it was determined that he might have potential
as a smuggler or a courier. He was given a
wooden box that contained a message and instructed to swallow it,
and once the box had been swallowed, he was sent
across the border into Prussia on his first mission, disguised
as a peasant. The idea was that he would pass
the box and then handed off to an imprisoned French
(12:35):
colonel that the Prussians had captured. Once the colonel had
read the message, he was send a reply back to
France in the exact same way by putting it in
the box, which Tarar would then swallow. And for a
quick contextual aside on the war of the First Coalition,
uh in June of King Louis the sixteenth and his
family had attempted to flee France and they were captured
(12:55):
near the Austrian border. In September of that year, Austria
and Prussia issued the Declaration of Pilnitz, which formally proclaimed
support for King Louis the sixteenth in the revolution and
was a move against the revolutionaries of France. So at
that point that's sort of how this war came about.
There are some problems with this plan of using terror
(13:16):
to move sensitive information, though he could easily consume almost
anything and smuggle it, but that really didn't translate into
making him a good spy. He could only speak French
and did not speak any Germans, so he really wasn't
able to smoothly navigate Prussia by himself. He also drew
a lot of attention to himself by reacting strangely when
(13:36):
people tried to talk to him. He wasn't particularly stealthy.
People actually called on military authorities to report him because
he was acting so strangely. So he wound up being
captured outside of Londo, and initially it seemed as though
Tarar might actually have some fortitude for espionage, despite not
having maybe the skills to move about in a foreign land.
(13:59):
In his first any four hours as a captive, he
gave up no information despite the fact that he was
being whipped and threatened with death repeatedly. But eventually he
was broken and he unfurled this bizarre tale of the
secret document that was lurking somewhere in his digestive tract.
Once he passed the box in exactly the natural way
(14:20):
that you're probably thinking, it was seized by the Prussian
forces who had been waiting for it since their captive
told them the story. It turned out that this first mission, though,
had really just been a test of whether it was
a viable way to move information. There was nothing of
value in the message in the box. The failed spy
was sent back to France, but not until after he
had been beaten several more times and even put in
a noose as though they were going to hang him.
(14:42):
This is basically the end of his spy career. Yeah,
the whole news thing was apparently a big joke, Like
Prussian officers stood there laughing while they watched this man
panic thinking he was going to die. Uh so this
is a failed failed mission all around. Um. And then
the next thing, we're going to talk a little bit
about Tarar's desperate hope that someone could finally cure him
(15:04):
of his constant hunger. But before we do, we're going
to pause for another word from a sponsor to get
back to the life of Tarar. The next significant event
in that life took place a few years later. He
(15:26):
was once again in a hospital for study, and during
this time he was visited again by Mr Percy. His
appetite was as intense as it had ever been, and
he had started eating this gross turns my little stomach
a little bit to say it. He had started eating
used bandages to try to stay full. It is gross
and it's one of those things that when I was
doing the research, my first thought was look, and then
(15:47):
I was like heartbreaking just to reach this point where
you will consume anything because you are so tired of
being hungry. And this is, as you can imagine, the
point where Tarar was really exhausted at trying to keep
pay with his own appetite, and he wanted desperately to
be cured of this affliction. So just about any theory
or idea that anyone could come up with to try
(16:10):
to treat him and get rid of this problem was tested. First,
he was dosed with opium that turned out to be
no help, and then a combination of tobacco pills and
sour wine was administered, but once again, his appetite was unabated.
And then a diet of boiled eggs was prescribed. Though
the patient was dubious of that plan, he did try it,
(16:31):
but it didn't again seem to help in any way.
In the meantime, he was supplementing the food that the
doctors were giving him on his own. He would sneak
out of the hospital and run roam the streets to
try to find more food. He ate scraps from butcher shops,
he picked through garbage, He allegedly competed with street dogs
and rats for sustenance, and even when he stayed inside
(16:54):
the hospital, he was still constantly looking for opportunities to
eat because they just could not get him to a
point where he could be comfortable or not just plagued
by this reminist sensation. So, in addition to the bandages
mentioned a moment ago, he was reported as having been
caught drinking blood that had been drained from patients through
(17:16):
vents section and more. Workers claimed that they found him
eating corpses on multiple occasions. Throughout all of this, Parcy
was attempting to treat Tarar and even fighting against other doctors.
He felt really strongly that he really needed to be
in an asylum, but nothing ever worked. Things continued in
this pattern of unsuccessful treatment, with tar Are getting in
(17:38):
trouble with the hospital to hospital staff, and Parcy advocating
on his behalf, until accusations were eventually leveled against tar
Are that his doctor just could not save him from
So an infant went missing at the hospital, and this
was a baby just fourteen months old, and the child
simply vanished. And while there was no evident that Tarrar
(18:00):
had been involved in this baby disappearing, all of his
bizarre behavior before this incident culminated in the doctors and
staff believing that the only possible explanation was that their
insatiable patient had eaten a helpless baby. And he was
never formally accused of any crime, but he was chased
away from the hospital, his treatment was abruptly halted, and
(18:21):
Mr Percy lost touch with his patient. Four years after
Tarrar was run out of military hospital, us A paracy
once again got word about his on again, off again patient.
This time the doctor was contacted by the chief surgeon
of a hospital in Versailles. Tarar, he was twenty six
at this point, was gravely ill. He had been admitted
(18:43):
to the hospital and he had immediately begun asking for
his former doctor. And we don't really know what he
was up to in those four years between when he
had been chased away from the military hospital and when
he turned up in Versailles. But when Percy arrived at
the hospital to see the patient in Tarar told him
that he had swallowed a golden fork that he had
(19:03):
stolen two years prior, and that he believed that this
fork was still lodged somewhere in his intestine and was
the cause of his illness, and he begged his doctor,
Monsieur Percy, to give him something, some sort of laxative,
anything that might force this obstructive utensil out. However, Sinsiere
Precy determined that whether or not there was a fork
(19:24):
trapped inside of this man, the real issue was that
he had contracted tuberculosis. Even though he had always had
this insatiable hunger, he had always appeared more or less
healthy in appearance, although quite thin, it was evident that
he was really at this point wasting away. Soon after
his doctor's arrival, Tarar was stricken with a very persistent diarrhea,
(19:46):
and he died within a matter of days, and his
corpse began to decompose at an unusually rapid rate, so
much so that while all of the doctors at the
hospital were fascinated with his case, most were unwilling to
even getting near his body, let alone examine it through dissection,
and eventually a Monsieur Tessier, who was the chief surgeon
(20:07):
that had contacted Percy and told him that his patient
was there at Versailles, undertook the task in an effort
to uncover clues about the deceased's unique biology. The findings
of the autopsy were not particularly surprising given what we
already know about Tarar. His gullet was unusually wide, so
wide that when Monsieur Tessier opened his jaws he could
(20:29):
see directly down into Tarar's stomach. Monsieur Percy later wrote
of Tarar's body, based on the findings of Monsieur Tessier quote,
his body, as soon as he was dead, became a
prey to a horrible corruption. The entrols were putrified, confounded together,
and immersed in pus. The liver was excessively large, void
(20:50):
of consistence in in a putrescent state. The gall bladder
was of considerable magnitude, the stomach in a lax state,
and having ulcerated patches first about it, covered almost the
whole of the abdominal region. They did not find the
fork that he had been sure that he had swallowed
and was still in his body. And the rapidly decaying
(21:11):
bodies odor became so intense that the dissection could not continue.
And the story of Tarar is one that, as we
mentioned earlier, when you initially hear some of the more
fantastic details, like the huge meals and the spy mission,
it's compelling and it's fascinating, and it's even funny in
some ways, in the way that gross things or bodily
functions can sometimes elicit laughter. But as you look at
(21:33):
the details of this man's really quite short life, it
takes on a much more tragic air. For example, it
appears that even though he didn't suffer from pico, which
is a disorder characterized by the compulsion to eat objects
that aren't food, just the same he was often driven
in desperation to eat things like hospital bandages in order
to simply address the fact that he was ceaselessly hungry. Yeah,
(21:58):
it's one of those stories that just the more I
think about it, the more sad I find the whole thing.
And I can't imagine what a life like that would
be like you're kind of held hostage at that point
by your medical condition. Yeah, And I didn't because after
after you sent the outline to me, I was like,
this is so strange. I wonder if there are theories
(22:18):
about what was going on, and I really didn't find
like you'll you'll find medical speculation of you know, did
such and such really kill so and so person. I
didn't really find a lot of that with him. But
it seems clear that he has to have had some
kind of like metabolic or digestive system disorder, something serious
going on that wasn't treated because let me know what
(22:41):
it was or how it is a thing that some
modern doctors will speculate on. Particularly um, you know, there
hints that he had some sort of overclocked metabolic situation,
especially since his body seemed to continue to be kind
of overburning even after he had died, as evidenced by
his rapid deck composition. But again, we never really sussed
(23:03):
out what the problem was there. Uh so he remains
a medical mystery probably forever. I have good news, Tracy.
Is it some listener mail that is not tragically sad.
It's listener mail that is not tragically sad, and it
is utterly delightful and as a cool example of people
combining art and technology. Are you ready? I am? Okay,
(23:26):
hold on, I gotta pull something up on my phone
to read it, and you'll understand why in a second.
So this comes from our listener, Carl, and he says,
Dear Holly and Tracy, listening to your podcast episode about
the history of knitting finally prompted me to combine two
of my artistic passions and send you real live mail.
I've emailed you a couple of times to thank you
(23:46):
for all you do, particularly in terms of highlighting issues
of race and gender in the stories you present, but
I felt that it was time to do something more concrete.
I've been knitting for about ten years now, and I've
told people things about the history of knitting that I
have now learned a completely false. From now on, I
will direct people who ask about it to your podcast episode.
The postcard I'm sending you has a simple stock in
(24:07):
itt panel on the front, knitted with a self striping
yarn called Unforgettable. The back is a stock in it
and shell lace in a white yarn that was gifted
from a friend. Since I know how much you love sewing,
I stitched the address block to the piece using a
blanket stitch. I'm actually showing this to Tracy now. This
is the first she is seeing it. It's amazing, but
(24:28):
this is where it gets really cool. Uh So I
will finish reading his letter, and then I will tell
you about my hilarious reaction when I got it, only
because it was filled with wonder. He says. This is
not the first piece of art I have made to
send through the mail. A friend in Atlanta named Michael
got me into it a few years ago. I've mostly
sent collages and drawings, so I did send a crochet
(24:49):
piece to a librarian friend. Once you can see images
of some of the pieces I've sent online. Mail art
is an interesting practice that grew out of the Fluxus
movement of intermedia artists in the nineteen fifties in nineties sixties,
which was in turn influenced by data is M and
the work of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Fluxus might
make for an interesting podcast topic. I concur that's my interjection,
(25:11):
he says. I'm hoping that this reaches you in good shape.
But part of the joy of mail art is seeing
what happens to a piece in transit. If you could
take photos of it and send them to me, even better,
I'm going to post them on social media so everyone
can see. I would really appreciate it, and he says,
as always, thank you from the bottom of my heart
from all you do with missed in history. Listening to
the two of you is honestly one of my greatest joys.
Be well, okay, Carl, this is amazing. And so here's
(25:33):
what happened. It came in an envelope, but one of
those clear envelopes that like reveals the whole thing. And
I got it, and our wonderful office manager, Tomika, was
with me, and I was like, what the heck is this?
Like how do this is really cool looking? But I
don't know, And then I realized that Carl, that brainiac
had implanted a QR code. Why it's printed out. It's
(25:54):
not knitted into it, which should just be extra mind blowing.
It's printed out, and it's stitched on with a blanket
stick along with our address. And then when I pulled
out my phone and activated the QR reader, it took
me to that wonderful letter, which is on the Internet
and not anything that came through the mail. That's awesome, Carl.
I love you because I love stuff like it's one
(26:17):
his network. It's gorgeous, it's insanely beautiful, like it's perfect
um and too. It's just the coolest way to engage
someone in a piece of art. And I will treasure
this forever. It's amazing. Yeah, I'm my mind was pretty
blown by it, and I have had it sitting on
my desk ever since, and I keep looking at it
(26:37):
and I'll just reach out to touch it in a
way that I can't even describe what I'm doing or
what I'm trying to get out of it. Like it's
not like I'm like, oh, it's not it's I just
want to touch it because I have this amazing piece
of living art sitting on my desk. And when Tracy
comes back to Atlanta next time, she will get to
have it on her desk for a little while too.
I won't be greedy, but it is cool. It's so Carl,
(27:00):
It's so cool. I love it. Um not a listener mail,
but I did want to give a shout out to
all of the people that I met. I was just
in Anaheim for the tinker Bell half marathon weekend, and
I met a variety of lovely fans and really had
just a delightful time talking to all of them. It
was so sweet whenever someone would come up and say hi,
(27:20):
and I just loved it. Um, so thank you to
everyone who said hello, and a couple hung out with
me here and there. It was just a great time,
so thank you for that. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. You can find us
a Facebook dot com slash missed in History, on Twitter
at missed in History, on Pinterest at pinter dot com
slash mist in History. We are on Instagram at mist
(27:42):
in History. Basically any of the social things. You can
find us at miss Industry. If you would like to
just do a little research for yourself, you can go
to our parents site, how stuff Works, or you can
visit us at our site, which is missed in History
dot com, where you can find show notes for every
episode that Tracy and I have worked on, as well
as an archive of every single episode of Stuffy Missed
in History class ever of all time, from way back
(28:03):
in the beginning when they were very short three to
five minutes segments up to the present day. We encourage
you come and visit us at mt in history dot
com and how to works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it how staff
works dot com,
Welcome to steph you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we are going to talk about a subject that was
requested by listener Nathan. Uh. And this is a story
(00:22):
that will come up. You'll see it kind of been
online article sometimes as this tale of gluttony that's, you know,
just amazing, and it is that, but really at its heart,
it's a medical mystery and it's really quite tragic at that. Uh.
Some of this, also, we should warn you feature some
gross ish bodily function stuff, so be warned. Uh. There's
(00:44):
also a little bit that might be tricky if you
are sensitive to animals being harmed. I know I am.
So we're not gonna get to graphic with it and
we're not going to linger on that, but we are
going to mention the details of it in that regard.
But if you are very, very squeamish, this may not
be the episode for you. And before we start talking
about the actual person will be discussing, we're going to
(01:04):
talk for just a minute about polyphagia. So this is
sometimes also called hyperphagia, which is basically terms I mean
excessive hunger or excessive eating or really markedly increased appetite.
These can be, uh regardless of which term you're using,
an indicator of diabetes because the body isn't properly converting
glucose into energy, so the body remains hungry and it
(01:27):
keeps seeking the energy it needs from additional sustenance, so
you you eat more and more you have a ongoing
insatiable appetite. But that is not the only thing that
polyphagia is linked to. It can also be um part
of any number of other triggers and bigger issues, including
stress and depression, hyper thyroidism, as well as medical conditions
(01:49):
such as Kleine Levin syndrome and Praytor Willie syndrome. But
some cases of this are really extreme. So we're not
talking about eating a lot because you've started really working out,
or eating a whole pie because you are upset about something.
These are really cases where the person's hunger can never
be stated in the volume and the nature of the
(02:09):
things that the person is eating really become pretty mind boggling.
So we are talking today about tore or tarre if
you want to english it up a little bit more.
Who was a French gentleman and most of the information
that we have about him is from an eighteen o
five publication of geenal de medicine in a piece entitled
Memoir la poe uh and this case study was written
(02:33):
by Pierre Francois Percy, who examined her are several times
throughout the man's life. So just to give a little
bit of background, because I mean, often when we're reading
old medical papers sometimes there's some questionable stuff in them
from before the days of evidence based medicine. So we
just want to establish this guy's credentials are a little
(02:55):
bit Pierre Francois Percy was this respected surgeon in France
and the late eventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. He
served as an army surgeon starting in seventeen eighty two,
and he invented a trolley that would carry medical supplies
and nursing staff directly onto battlefields for treatment of wounded
soldiers without having to take them away to another location.
(03:16):
He also invented the surgical quiver, so this was a
carrying kit that held a tourniquet and eleven different surgical
instruments which a surgeon could wear on his shoulders, free
up his hands, have all that stuff easy to access. Yeah,
I wanted to find a picture of one, and I
didn't manage to do so. I'm sure there's gotta be
one out there, but I would love to see it. Uh.
Percy was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor
(03:38):
in eighteen o four, and he only left his military
medical career when he developed chronic eye inflammation that just
made it not really feasible to stay basically on active
duty as a doctor. Uh. He then went on to
oversee health inspection services and to teach at the Faculty
of Medicine in Paris, and after his death he was
called the father of military surgeons. And thanks to Monsieur Prescy,
(04:00):
we have medical notes on the man known as Tarar,
but we still have huge gaps in our knowledge on
this unusual patient's background. Tarar was born in Lele, France
in the seventeen seventies, and we don't know his name
at birth or really anything about his family, because he
left home when he was very young. This allegedly was
because his parents were unable to provide food for him
(04:24):
and they turned him out of the family home. The
apocryphal story of the origin of his name suggests that
it's basically a nickname after a sort of an amato
poetic phrase that was used in France at the time,
which kind of went and that referred to a big
explosions to sort of like saying kaboom uh. And the
(04:45):
explosions in this explanation were his constant bursts of flatulence.
So to survive on his own as a boy, Tarar
would beg He would sometimes even steal, but he was
really never able to gather enough food to key uh
himself filled up. He was from a very young age,
could never really meet his appetites needs, and by the
(05:08):
time he was seventeen, he weighed barely a hundred pounds
or forty so very lean. He could also at this
point allegedly eat as much as a quarter of beef
in a day at this point, so that is literally
one quarter of the beef animal. If you purchase a
quarter of beef today, it's usually estimated as being somewhere
between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty
(05:29):
pounds that's fifty four to sixty eight ms. So once
you lose some of that weight to the inedible sections
like the bone, etcetera. He was basically capable of eating
just about the equivalent of his own weight in a
given day. Eventually, he joined up with a group of
traveling entertainers and he was able to put his unending
hunger to work. As part of the show, he would
(05:50):
challenge spectators to basically beat him enough to be false,
so he ate huge quantities of apples and mere minutes.
He would even consume things that weren't food, like corks
and flints. And he enlisted as a soldier with the
French revolution Army during the War of the First Coalition
against Austria and Prussia, and in an effort to ensure
(06:10):
that he was getting enough food, Tarar would do all
of the work of his fellow soldiers in the battalion
in return for portions of their rations, usually quite a
lot of them. But it simply wasn't enough, and his
energy really lagged. He became very weak and ill, and
he was eventually admitted to a military hospital in suits.
The medical staff at this military hospital immediately increased his
(06:33):
rations fourfold, and while he was in the hospital, he
would also eat any food that other patients had been
unable or unwilling to eat. He managed to get some
kitchen scraps as well. But even though none of this
was enough, he continued to be hungry all the time,
so much so that he would break into the hospital
pharmacy and eat anything that he could get his hands on.
And we're going to talk next about some additional treatment
(06:55):
that he had at the military hospital and how his
examination by doctor actually led to a strange and rather
brief career move. But first we're going to have a
word from one of our sponsors. Going to get back
(07:15):
to our story. It was during this treatment at a
military hospital that Sir met, among other doctors, Baron Percy.
And this is the man who serves as the primary
source of information about him. He penned he being Dr
Percy penned a very thorough and pretty unsettling description of
the patient in his memoirs on the case, and it
(07:37):
reads his cheeks were sallow and furrowed by long and
deep wrinkles. On distending them, he could hold in them
as many as a dozen eggs or apples. His mouth
was very large, He had hardly any lips. He had
all his teeth. The muellers were much worn away, and
the color of their enamels streaked like marble. The space
between the jaws, when they were fully separated, measured about
(08:00):
four inches. In this state, with the head inclined backwards,
the mouth and esophagus form erectilinear canal into which a
cylinder of a foot in circumference could be introduced without
touching the palate. He often stanked to such agree that
he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.
He was subject to a flux from the bowels, and
(08:20):
his dejections were fetted beyond all conception. When he had
not eaten copiously within a short time, the skin of
his belly would wrap almost around his body. When he
was well satiated with food, the vapor from his body
increased his cheeks and his eyes became a vivid red.
A brutal somnolence, and a sort of habitude came over
(08:41):
him while he digested. He was in this state troubled
with noisy belchings, and made in moving his jaw some
motions like those of dead lutition. Another quote from stere
of Percy about Tara goes like this, let a person
imagine all that domesticated and wild animals, the most filthy
and ravenous are capable of devouring, and they may form
(09:03):
some idea of the appetite as well as the wants
of Terrara. And this likening of Tarar's tastes to the
most filthy and ravenous animals is due to the fact
that he developed a fondness for both rotten meat and
very very fresh meat. This is where it gets a
bit difficult for animal lovers in the crowd, including frankly,
(09:23):
both of us. So great and voracious was this man's
appetite that he eventually took to eating live animals in
an effort to sustain himself. He is said to have
eaten a live cat in front of an army physician
named Dr Laurence, and much in the way that a
wild animal would was the way he approached eating this cat,
and then afterward he produced a hairball of the cat's fur,
(09:46):
and as part of his uh treatment there at the hospital,
they were kind of testing what sort of things he
would eat, so cats were not his only live diet.
He also would eat dogs, snakes, eels, and lizards. He
was apparently very fond of serpents, swallowing them whole without chewing.
There's one description that describes him as sort of crushing
(10:07):
the head with his jaw and then swallowing the whole thing.
The doctors at the military hospital were so completely fascinated
with Tarar that they concocted massive meals to feed him,
as they observed he was once spent a feast besides
that you might prepare for more than a dozen men,
and he devoured it all in its entirety. At one meal,
(10:27):
he downed four gallons of milk in addition to two
full sized meat pies. You ever heard about challenges or
people try to chug a single gallon of milk in
one go. You know, it's incredibly difficult and frankly dangerous,
so please don't try it. So four at once on
top of a very substantial meal is truly astonishing. Yeah,
it's kind of one of those moments where, when you
really think about it, it kind of can turn your stomach,
(10:48):
So don't think too hard on that. Uh. And when
he would eat these immense portions, Tarar's belly, all that
skin that Percy had written could wrap around him. When
he hadn't eaten, would become distended, and he would, as mentioned,
sleep for a while, very very deeply as he digested.
This is one of those things that seems so far
(11:09):
fetched that like part of me wonders, this is a
giant hoax perpetuated by like multiple physicians at the same time.
But like, there's so much primary source documentation describing him
that that seems like it would have been a colossal feat. Yeah.
I mean, we don't have a ton compared to some things,
(11:29):
but for medical issues of an era, for one patient
to have so many people kind of involved in commenting
on it, it's fairly substantiated and completely horrifying. But uh, yeah,
it's I can't imagine what it would have been like
for a bunch of doctors to be puzzling out what
(11:51):
the heck is going on with this person and trying
to come up with ways to test it. Yeah, especially
given how relatively especially given where we were in medical
history basically so, Sarra's unique condition unsurprisingly intrigued both the
doctors and the military quite greatly. They tested and steadying him,
(12:14):
and eventually it was determined that he might have potential
as a smuggler or a courier. He was given a
wooden box that contained a message and instructed to swallow it,
and once the box had been swallowed, he was sent
across the border into Prussia on his first mission, disguised
as a peasant. The idea was that he would pass
the box and then handed off to an imprisoned French
(12:35):
colonel that the Prussians had captured. Once the colonel had
read the message, he was send a reply back to
France in the exact same way by putting it in
the box, which Tarar would then swallow. And for a
quick contextual aside on the war of the First Coalition,
uh in June of King Louis the sixteenth and his
family had attempted to flee France and they were captured
(12:55):
near the Austrian border. In September of that year, Austria
and Prussia issued the Declaration of Pilnitz, which formally proclaimed
support for King Louis the sixteenth in the revolution and
was a move against the revolutionaries of France. So at
that point that's sort of how this war came about.
There are some problems with this plan of using terror
(13:16):
to move sensitive information, though he could easily consume almost
anything and smuggle it, but that really didn't translate into
making him a good spy. He could only speak French
and did not speak any Germans, so he really wasn't
able to smoothly navigate Prussia by himself. He also drew
a lot of attention to himself by reacting strangely when
(13:36):
people tried to talk to him. He wasn't particularly stealthy.
People actually called on military authorities to report him because
he was acting so strangely. So he wound up being
captured outside of Londo, and initially it seemed as though
Tarar might actually have some fortitude for espionage, despite not
having maybe the skills to move about in a foreign land.
(13:59):
In his first any four hours as a captive, he
gave up no information despite the fact that he was
being whipped and threatened with death repeatedly. But eventually he
was broken and he unfurled this bizarre tale of the
secret document that was lurking somewhere in his digestive tract.
Once he passed the box in exactly the natural way
(14:20):
that you're probably thinking, it was seized by the Prussian
forces who had been waiting for it since their captive
told them the story. It turned out that this first mission, though,
had really just been a test of whether it was
a viable way to move information. There was nothing of
value in the message in the box. The failed spy
was sent back to France, but not until after he
had been beaten several more times and even put in
a noose as though they were going to hang him.
(14:42):
This is basically the end of his spy career. Yeah,
the whole news thing was apparently a big joke, Like
Prussian officers stood there laughing while they watched this man
panic thinking he was going to die. Uh so this
is a failed failed mission all around. Um. And then
the next thing, we're going to talk a little bit
about Tarar's desperate hope that someone could finally cure him
(15:04):
of his constant hunger. But before we do, we're going
to pause for another word from a sponsor to get
back to the life of Tarar. The next significant event
in that life took place a few years later. He
(15:26):
was once again in a hospital for study, and during
this time he was visited again by Mr Percy. His
appetite was as intense as it had ever been, and
he had started eating this gross turns my little stomach
a little bit to say it. He had started eating
used bandages to try to stay full. It is gross
and it's one of those things that when I was
doing the research, my first thought was look, and then
(15:47):
I was like heartbreaking just to reach this point where
you will consume anything because you are so tired of
being hungry. And this is, as you can imagine, the
point where Tarar was really exhausted at trying to keep
pay with his own appetite, and he wanted desperately to
be cured of this affliction. So just about any theory
or idea that anyone could come up with to try
(16:10):
to treat him and get rid of this problem was tested. First,
he was dosed with opium that turned out to be
no help, and then a combination of tobacco pills and
sour wine was administered, but once again, his appetite was unabated.
And then a diet of boiled eggs was prescribed. Though
the patient was dubious of that plan, he did try it,
(16:31):
but it didn't again seem to help in any way.
In the meantime, he was supplementing the food that the
doctors were giving him on his own. He would sneak
out of the hospital and run roam the streets to
try to find more food. He ate scraps from butcher shops,
he picked through garbage, He allegedly competed with street dogs
and rats for sustenance, and even when he stayed inside
(16:54):
the hospital, he was still constantly looking for opportunities to
eat because they just could not get him to a
point where he could be comfortable or not just plagued
by this reminist sensation. So, in addition to the bandages
mentioned a moment ago, he was reported as having been
caught drinking blood that had been drained from patients through
(17:16):
vents section and more. Workers claimed that they found him
eating corpses on multiple occasions. Throughout all of this, Parcy
was attempting to treat Tarar and even fighting against other doctors.
He felt really strongly that he really needed to be
in an asylum, but nothing ever worked. Things continued in
this pattern of unsuccessful treatment, with tar Are getting in
(17:38):
trouble with the hospital to hospital staff, and Parcy advocating
on his behalf, until accusations were eventually leveled against tar
Are that his doctor just could not save him from
So an infant went missing at the hospital, and this
was a baby just fourteen months old, and the child
simply vanished. And while there was no evident that Tarrar
(18:00):
had been involved in this baby disappearing, all of his
bizarre behavior before this incident culminated in the doctors and
staff believing that the only possible explanation was that their
insatiable patient had eaten a helpless baby. And he was
never formally accused of any crime, but he was chased
away from the hospital, his treatment was abruptly halted, and
(18:21):
Mr Percy lost touch with his patient. Four years after
Tarrar was run out of military hospital, us A paracy
once again got word about his on again, off again patient.
This time the doctor was contacted by the chief surgeon
of a hospital in Versailles. Tarar, he was twenty six
at this point, was gravely ill. He had been admitted
(18:43):
to the hospital and he had immediately begun asking for
his former doctor. And we don't really know what he
was up to in those four years between when he
had been chased away from the military hospital and when
he turned up in Versailles. But when Percy arrived at
the hospital to see the patient in Tarar told him
that he had swallowed a golden fork that he had
(19:03):
stolen two years prior, and that he believed that this
fork was still lodged somewhere in his intestine and was
the cause of his illness, and he begged his doctor,
Monsieur Percy, to give him something, some sort of laxative,
anything that might force this obstructive utensil out. However, Sinsiere
Precy determined that whether or not there was a fork
(19:24):
trapped inside of this man, the real issue was that
he had contracted tuberculosis. Even though he had always had
this insatiable hunger, he had always appeared more or less
healthy in appearance, although quite thin, it was evident that
he was really at this point wasting away. Soon after
his doctor's arrival, Tarar was stricken with a very persistent diarrhea,
(19:46):
and he died within a matter of days, and his
corpse began to decompose at an unusually rapid rate, so
much so that while all of the doctors at the
hospital were fascinated with his case, most were unwilling to
even getting near his body, let alone examine it through dissection,
and eventually a Monsieur Tessier, who was the chief surgeon
(20:07):
that had contacted Percy and told him that his patient
was there at Versailles, undertook the task in an effort
to uncover clues about the deceased's unique biology. The findings
of the autopsy were not particularly surprising given what we
already know about Tarar. His gullet was unusually wide, so
wide that when Monsieur Tessier opened his jaws he could
(20:29):
see directly down into Tarar's stomach. Monsieur Percy later wrote
of Tarar's body, based on the findings of Monsieur Tessier quote,
his body, as soon as he was dead, became a
prey to a horrible corruption. The entrols were putrified, confounded together,
and immersed in pus. The liver was excessively large, void
(20:50):
of consistence in in a putrescent state. The gall bladder
was of considerable magnitude, the stomach in a lax state,
and having ulcerated patches first about it, covered almost the
whole of the abdominal region. They did not find the
fork that he had been sure that he had swallowed
and was still in his body. And the rapidly decaying
(21:11):
bodies odor became so intense that the dissection could not continue.
And the story of Tarar is one that, as we
mentioned earlier, when you initially hear some of the more
fantastic details, like the huge meals and the spy mission,
it's compelling and it's fascinating, and it's even funny in
some ways, in the way that gross things or bodily
functions can sometimes elicit laughter. But as you look at
(21:33):
the details of this man's really quite short life, it
takes on a much more tragic air. For example, it
appears that even though he didn't suffer from pico, which
is a disorder characterized by the compulsion to eat objects
that aren't food, just the same he was often driven
in desperation to eat things like hospital bandages in order
to simply address the fact that he was ceaselessly hungry. Yeah,
(21:58):
it's one of those stories that just the more I
think about it, the more sad I find the whole thing.
And I can't imagine what a life like that would
be like you're kind of held hostage at that point
by your medical condition. Yeah, And I didn't because after
after you sent the outline to me, I was like,
this is so strange. I wonder if there are theories
(22:18):
about what was going on, and I really didn't find
like you'll you'll find medical speculation of you know, did
such and such really kill so and so person. I
didn't really find a lot of that with him. But
it seems clear that he has to have had some
kind of like metabolic or digestive system disorder, something serious
going on that wasn't treated because let me know what
(22:41):
it was or how it is a thing that some
modern doctors will speculate on. Particularly um, you know, there
hints that he had some sort of overclocked metabolic situation,
especially since his body seemed to continue to be kind
of overburning even after he had died, as evidenced by
his rapid deck composition. But again, we never really sussed
(23:03):
out what the problem was there. Uh so he remains
a medical mystery probably forever. I have good news, Tracy.
Is it some listener mail that is not tragically sad.
It's listener mail that is not tragically sad, and it
is utterly delightful and as a cool example of people
combining art and technology. Are you ready? I am? Okay,
(23:26):
hold on, I gotta pull something up on my phone
to read it, and you'll understand why in a second.
So this comes from our listener, Carl, and he says,
Dear Holly and Tracy, listening to your podcast episode about
the history of knitting finally prompted me to combine two
of my artistic passions and send you real live mail.
I've emailed you a couple of times to thank you
(23:46):
for all you do, particularly in terms of highlighting issues
of race and gender in the stories you present, but
I felt that it was time to do something more concrete.
I've been knitting for about ten years now, and I've
told people things about the history of knitting that I
have now learned a completely false. From now on, I
will direct people who ask about it to your podcast episode.
The postcard I'm sending you has a simple stock in
(24:07):
itt panel on the front, knitted with a self striping
yarn called Unforgettable. The back is a stock in it
and shell lace in a white yarn that was gifted
from a friend. Since I know how much you love sewing,
I stitched the address block to the piece using a
blanket stitch. I'm actually showing this to Tracy now. This
is the first she is seeing it. It's amazing, but
(24:28):
this is where it gets really cool. Uh So I
will finish reading his letter, and then I will tell
you about my hilarious reaction when I got it, only
because it was filled with wonder. He says. This is
not the first piece of art I have made to
send through the mail. A friend in Atlanta named Michael
got me into it a few years ago. I've mostly
sent collages and drawings, so I did send a crochet
(24:49):
piece to a librarian friend. Once you can see images
of some of the pieces I've sent online. Mail art
is an interesting practice that grew out of the Fluxus
movement of intermedia artists in the nineteen fifties in nineties sixties,
which was in turn influenced by data is M and
the work of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Fluxus might
make for an interesting podcast topic. I concur that's my interjection,
(25:11):
he says. I'm hoping that this reaches you in good shape.
But part of the joy of mail art is seeing
what happens to a piece in transit. If you could
take photos of it and send them to me, even better,
I'm going to post them on social media so everyone
can see. I would really appreciate it, and he says,
as always, thank you from the bottom of my heart
from all you do with missed in history. Listening to
the two of you is honestly one of my greatest joys.
Be well, okay, Carl, this is amazing. And so here's
(25:33):
what happened. It came in an envelope, but one of
those clear envelopes that like reveals the whole thing. And
I got it, and our wonderful office manager, Tomika, was
with me, and I was like, what the heck is this?
Like how do this is really cool looking? But I
don't know, And then I realized that Carl, that brainiac
had implanted a QR code. Why it's printed out. It's
(25:54):
not knitted into it, which should just be extra mind blowing.
It's printed out, and it's stitched on with a blanket
stick along with our address. And then when I pulled
out my phone and activated the QR reader, it took
me to that wonderful letter, which is on the Internet
and not anything that came through the mail. That's awesome, Carl.
I love you because I love stuff like it's one
(26:17):
his network. It's gorgeous, it's insanely beautiful, like it's perfect
um and too. It's just the coolest way to engage
someone in a piece of art. And I will treasure
this forever. It's amazing. Yeah, I'm my mind was pretty
blown by it, and I have had it sitting on
my desk ever since, and I keep looking at it
(26:37):
and I'll just reach out to touch it in a
way that I can't even describe what I'm doing or
what I'm trying to get out of it. Like it's
not like I'm like, oh, it's not it's I just
want to touch it because I have this amazing piece
of living art sitting on my desk. And when Tracy
comes back to Atlanta next time, she will get to
have it on her desk for a little while too.
I won't be greedy, but it is cool. It's so Carl,
(27:00):
It's so cool. I love it. Um not a listener mail,
but I did want to give a shout out to
all of the people that I met. I was just
in Anaheim for the tinker Bell half marathon weekend, and
I met a variety of lovely fans and really had
just a delightful time talking to all of them. It
was so sweet whenever someone would come up and say hi,
(27:20):
and I just loved it. Um, so thank you to
everyone who said hello, and a couple hung out with
me here and there. It was just a great time,
so thank you for that. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. You can find us
a Facebook dot com slash missed in History, on Twitter
at missed in History, on Pinterest at pinter dot com
slash mist in History. We are on Instagram at mist
(27:42):
in History. Basically any of the social things. You can
find us at miss Industry. If you would like to
just do a little research for yourself, you can go
to our parents site, how stuff Works, or you can
visit us at our site, which is missed in History
dot com, where you can find show notes for every
episode that Tracy and I have worked on, as well
as an archive of every single episode of Stuffy Missed
in History class ever of all time, from way back
(28:03):
in the beginning when they were very short three to
five minutes segments up to the present day. We encourage
you come and visit us at mt in history dot
com and how to works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it how staff
works dot com,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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