Tarrare

The story of Tarrare is one of the most bizarre in history. Around 1772, Tarrare was born in France. As a teenager, it became apparent that Tarrare was different from other people because of his endless need for food.

His parents eventually had to disown him because Tarrare ate everything in the house, including the pets. In his twenties, Tarrare was the warm-up act to a traveling charlatan. He would swallow corks, stones, live animals, and whole apples. To satisfy his hunger, Tarrare would eat anything available from the town gutters and garbage piles.

His bizarre ability soon caught the attention of the government and Tarrare was the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity.

Tarrare was known to eat live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies. On one occasion, he swallowed an eel without chewing.

Despite his unusual diet and endless need for meat, Tarrare was of normal sized man with no signs of mental illness. He was described as having unusually soft hair, and an abnormally wide mouth in which his teeth were heavily stained, and lips almost invisible. Tarrare constantly suffered from foul body odor. He was described as stinking “to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.” 

General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare’s abilities to use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army. He would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination.

Tarrare was strongly chastened for his hunger and wanted to fix the problem. He agreed to submit to a procedure that would cure his appetite, but it failed. While at the hospital getting treated, Tarrare would sneak out of his room and scavenge for entrails left in gutters, rubbish heaps, and outside butcher shops.

He attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and looted the corpses in the morgue. After falling under suspicion of eating a toddler, Tarrare was ejected from the hospital.

In 1798, he reappeared in Versailles suffering from severe tuberculosis and died. After his death, Tarrare’s corpse rotted quickly. At the autopsy, his body was found to be filled with pus. Tarrare’s liver, gallbladder, and stomach were abnormally large and he was covered in ulcers.