
Tarrare - aaaaaaaaaaab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare
======
jzamora
Sam O'nella has a great video on him:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-
rc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-rc)

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failrate
"After being suspected of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital."
The article is unclear on whether they found the missing tyke.

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

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jackfraser
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Descendants

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stcredzero
_Redundant Array of Inexpensive Descendants_

Here's my evolutionary "Just So Story" for why human kids like to wander away
and put things into their mouths. Basically, they acted as food tasters for
the group. Makes sense, since the group has invested in them the least, they
know nothing important, and in a state of nature, they're likely to die
anyways.

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pavlov
I suspect eating insects also provided meaningful additional nutrition for
toddlers.

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rusk
Not to mention developing the immune system.

They always go for the dirtiest thing in the room. Acquire and share.

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

[https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg)

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

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xd
You should look up the LA beast.

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nyolfen
competitive eaters have nothing on shoe

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delinka
"The fork was never found."

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kaffeemitsahne
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery)

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masklinn
And they're contemporaries.

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hnick
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?

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hosh
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.

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

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magissima
A real life shonen manga protagonist.

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tragic
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-...](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2017/jan/26/watch-
a-clip-from-the-depraved-appetite-of-tarrare-the-freak-video)

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

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jandrese
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.

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upbeatlinux
Reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly)

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cryoshon
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.

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

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

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

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

[https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-
ma...](https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-man-who-ate-
everything)

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overgard
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)

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aboutruby
> 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.

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vertline3
Seems he had trouble absorbing calories from what he ate somehow.

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jml7c5
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.

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kmm
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/2,4-Dinitrophenol)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncoupling_protein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncoupling_protein)

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justtopost
DNP has a particularly vile reputation in the fitness community, yet many
still use it.

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StavrosK
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?

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close04
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/](https://xkcd.com/1235/)

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

~~~
StavrosK
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.

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trhway
>Eating his body weight in a day? That's pretty outlandish and easily
debunked.

no. I don't understand what you're basing your claim on. As far as i see it is
easily possible. Even with anatomically normal gut some stuff can make from
mouth to the other end in as short as 30 minutes. So the bandwidth is there
(say it takes 1 hour to make through the 7m length of the gut pipe which say
of 4 square centimeter section - that is 2.8 liter/hour speed) . The story of
that guy says that he had severe diarrhea and overall really suggests that he
had severe gut bacterial issues - that is one of the situations when stuff
makes it very quickly through the gut.

He is described as of a small weight despite significant food intake - that
again matches the situation of the food quickly passing through instead of
thorough digestion. He is described as constantly scavenging and eating - say
15 hours a day 4 kg/hour (in the ballpark of the above mentioned 2.8l/hour)
gives you 60kg. 4kg/hour quickly moving non-stop though the gut does sound
like a severe diarrhea.

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benj111
I don't think I've ever heard bandwidth used in this context.

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fallingfrog
good luck falling asleep tonight everyone

