The best teacher at my high school could never eat enough to maintain his body weight - all day long he sipped little juice boxes of protein goop that he took with a grimace from a bear sized stack of pallets against the back wall of his office .
He was nearish to seven foot, and in his opinion, didn't have a big enough stomach for the task.
As a young man he'd been a skinny pole. During a university science lab he had discovered he has an extraordinary ability to taste tiny concentrations of chemicals, somehow this information got passed on to an ice cream factory, and he got a summer holiday job tasting the ice cream for traces of the 'wrong' flavour e.g. could he still taste coffee after the line had been switched form ice coffee to strawberry. The story went that over three months of eating ice cream all day everyday, he blossomed into a ripped Adonis, and subsequently with his new athletic physique become a windsurfing champion. (yes there is such a thing as a windsurfing champion) But eating ice cream is not the universal delight you and I assume it is. It was a subjective ordeal, a long torturous slog, long days of spoon upon spoon. At the end of the summer, the now champion, couldn't face another bucket and began the lifelong search for something he could endure eating in quantities to satisfy his metabolism
Wow, what a thrill it must be to be a high school teacher and be able to say to your students "I turned down a job in the ice-cream factory for this shit".
Nah - apart from the eating he was a happy one. I went to a high school on the island where Thor from the movies grew up. The good teachers were there because they wanted to surf, smoke a bit of dope and not work too much. The teachers that didn't surf we're miserable creatures, bitter and humiliated they'd had to crawl to the ends of the earth to meet the standard for employability.
Yep, complete with a summer holiday job picking up tourist rubbish at the (duckduckgoable phrase) penguin parade. But I have now strayed to far from the original topic
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.
You are because in 1847, 49 years after Terrare’s death in 1798, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered washing your hands before operations drastically reduced morality would be ignored and ridiculed by his peers for years until he suffered a mental breakdown and was thrown into an insane asylum where he was beaten and died.
Around this same time people still believed that disease was caused by miasma. That is, disease was carried by smell alone. This is why plague doctors in centuries prior had those masks with beaks filled with spices and aromatics; cannot smell the disease? You cannot contract it. Make no mistake though, that was still the common belief until Dr. Jon Snow proved cholera was caused by polluted water and not miasma.
This is a time where if you couldn’t sense something yourself then it wasn’t considered real; its no wonder that mental illness wasn’t (and still isn’t) really taken seriously either in some degree or at all.
AFAIK Semmelweiss acted very cranky before and the forced hospitalization of him in an asylum was a consequence of a long string of hostile incidents.
Once I read some examples of texts written by Semmelweiss; if they were representative, he had a problem, possibly paranoid schizophrenia. This kind of belligerent word salad does not get written by healthy people.
That does not justify his tragic death or diminish his scientific discoveries, of course.
I also think, though I might have my historical periods wrong, he lived in a time when stray dogs and cats were considered pests and eating puppies and kittens wasn't the weirdest thing.
> In one year [Domery] devoured 174 cats (not their skins) dead or alive; and says, he had several severe conflicts of interest in the act of destroying them, by feeling the effects of their torments on his face and hands: sometimes he killed them before eating, but when very hungry, did not wait to perform this humane office
So in that case, the person reporting it is saying the man was indeed scratched up by the cats.
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.
It wasn't until the 19th century the notion of systematically cataloging anything got much traction. See e.g. how the SI and MKS systems came from this time. This was the point in time where science as an activity got a lot more organized.
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.
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.
It's interesting that in the British navy, "Able" seaman was not about disability as we would think about it at all (even though they would, like, climb up ropes or whatever sailors do). It seems much closer to how we'd think of junior engineer/engineer/senior engineer in terms of increasing experience.
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.
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)...
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.)
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?
I don't see that he had what we would normally classify as a mental disorder. He had a physical disorder which required him to eat constantly, and the quantities of food he required were not easily available, leading him down a dark path where he ate anything and everything. His survival instinct caused him to eat live animals because he was in such a state he did not have time to kill and cook them and realized it did not matter to his body. I guess at some point his instinct was so strong that he stopped seeing animals (including humans) as beings and simply as food to keep him alive. It's fascinatingly morbid.
Yes, exactly. I'm a type 1 diabetic, and episodes of hypoglycemia can cause a survival instinct to eat, and it's possible to lose all sense of rationality in those moments. But nobody would say I have a mental illness after one of those episodes. It's a physical disorder that may or may not have an accompanying mental disorder.
> I guess at some point his instinct was so strong that he stopped seeing animals (including humans) as beings and simply as food to keep him alive.
I think perhaps that would be a mental disorder. If not then, at least now. It might have been caused by real life physical issues, but aren't they often?
Brings a whole new level of hangry. There's so many "I'm so hungry..." quips that have always made me raise an eyebrow in the "wtf does that mean?" level of oddness. Some of the things in this wiki article topped the strangest of what I had heard up until then.
It was doctors and nurses feeding him puppies and kittens. Who are we saying is mentally ill? I doubt he ate a toddler; the guy we have been feeding live animals is a convenient scapegoat.
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.
DNP is a common drug used by bodybuilders to drop fat extremely quickly. Like 20 pounds in 2 weeks quickly. It basically turns your metabolism up to 125% of normal. They describe themselves as being hot and sweaty at all times…though they do also say it destroys their appetite.
Fun fact…it was originally developed as an explosive in WW1 and it was observed the workers in the munitions factories were losing tons of weight (and dying). Turns out DNP is a poison. Who would have guessed.
I would never suggest anyone use DNP but my understanding is that the cataract side effect is predominantly limited to women. I know dozens of men who have used it for years (from my time in the strength and bodybuilding sports) and not a single one had accelerated cataract development. Of the 5 women I knew who used it, 4 have developed cataracts before 50!
I am looking for the paper on this but there’s a preprint I reviewed when I was a referee for a journal that was a meta-analysis on DNP side effects papers. The authors never resubmitted it but a lot of the data was solid. If I can find it I’ll share.
That's wild, but it sounds incredibly dangerous. Even if it were possible to safely dose something like this, getting pure and well-measured quantities has to be really, really hard, right? We're talking tens or hundreds of milligrams between 'safe' doses and unsafe ones. (200-300 seems to be 'recommended' starting dose; 350 is the lowest recorded fatal dose)
I'd love to be beautiful as much as the next guy but man, seems risky.
David Sinclair at Harvard is working on making this molecule safe. Back in the day it was FDA approved it was wildly popular, but the "idiot takes 10x the dosage and cooks their insides" is too much of a risk for a 2020+ general population especially given the extremely slow half time.
I wish that we'd care less about said edge cases. It's one thing to have an obscure, nonobvious death sentence, but "don't overdose on meds" should be common sense enough to avoid tiptoeing about it.
It's a weird double ... I wish someone had a nice word for this.
In modern America, with allopathic medicine being the norm, its difficult to obtain some things that are likely safe at a 3 sigma confidence interval. Yet conversely, and reminder we share healthcare costs partially as a society through Medicare and Medicaid, you're free to pour McDonalds into yourself and add $X00k of cost onto the healthcare system, and "infringing on that right" and heaven forbid enacting a tax on sugar products is somehow unacceptable.
I can shorten my life expectancy by 15 years in so many ways. But to buy XYZ drug without a giant multi-day process which on average is positive, and even at ABC confidence level is not negative, nahhhh we don't trust you as a society to do that.
Super frustrating in a borderline libertarian rant.
> getting pure and well-measured quantities has to be really, really hard, right?
Accurate scales are very affordable nowadays. A $50 Gemini-20 can accurately measure in the milligram range with very little tolerance. The danger is probably more of people not keeping to the right dosages.
In case you are wondering why oc suspected mitochondria, it's because many people believe (though science can't say for certain) that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
My roommate in college was 120# when soaking wet, we would split the "dinner for 4" special. He would have one slice and a few cheese sticks. I ate the rest.
Fascinating - I don't remember ever seeing that usage, didn't know it's used for pounds/weight, although I knew "pound sign" is one name for #. Seems the sign evolved from "lb" with a horizontal line through it.
"When # is after a number, it is read as "pound" or "pounds", meaning the unit of weight. ...rare outside North America."
Sorry to go even more OT, but were you familiar with the "soaking wet" part? Your profile says Australia and I'm curious if that's an idiom there as well.
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?
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.
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.
How curious that both of the most incredibly voracious people ever both served Napoleon in the same time frame and their stories come from few isolated documents..
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.
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.
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
I would agree that his enlarged stomach is probably a bi-product of his illness.
In the periods when I've eaten a lot, I could eat a lot. In the periods when I was eating only tiny meals on a regular basis, my stomach would shrink and I would only need tiny amounts of food to fill satiated.
> 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?
Look, I'm not suggesting anyone eat any kind of live animal, especially cats, but I think there's a question here of how exactly one would eat some of these animals... even my smallest cat is easily way too big to fit in my mouth and certainly too big to pass through my esophagus, and all of that disregards the very practical consideration of the animal fighting back. Thus, I read a great deal of dramatic flair and exaggeration in the article - it seems vey unlikely that he ate all of the things listed, at least not in the way they were described, but rather it seems likely that there arose some fables given the person's clear extreme appetite and habits.
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.
At first glance, it is less surprising when he's eating live animals as a "warm-up act for a traveling charlatan" than when he does so as an experiment for medical professionals. With a little reflection this is probably more of a modern surprise -- medical ethics were a bit lax at the time I guess.
I suspect one of the reasons could have been for money. He would certainly have been a sideshow from an early age, wherever he went, and I'm sure people would find animals to give him on the condition he ate them live as entertainment.
They would have to be small or skinny cats though, even with an enlarged gullet.
I think you'd at the very least separate the fur coat from the meat. Tarrare seemingly ate every part of the cat except for the bones - and then just vomited out the extra bits (like the fur coat).
> 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.
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.
I can’t help but notice that they lived at the same time! Charles was born 6 years later and died 2 years later.
Since he was on the Russian side, fighting against the french, where Tarrare was, they should’ve organized a ‘who can eat more’ battle, and winner wins the war. Would’ve saved lots of lives.
Can someone provide a physical explanation in terms of conservation of energy? If he was eating that much, where did all that energy go? Did he really sweat and poop it?
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.
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…
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.
I know several people who eat way less than me and are as fat as ticks. The simple fact that calories in calories out does not 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… I think you could argue they are responsible for killing people at this point. The negligence is astounding.
The fact that different people burn different amounts of calories due to genetics and epi-genetics and other environmental factors does not invalidate calories in calories out.
I live with them. I work at home and one of them does too. I see basically everything they eat. I know how much they exercise. They simply use more of the food they eat to make fat. And yes, calories in calories out is complete bullshit. There is no rule or axiom of biology that says you have to utilize 100% of the food energy that you consume. It’s possible for people to put it all away as fat, none of it as fat, all of it for energy or none of it for energy as illustrated in this case and in African sleeping sickness. People who say that it’s a matter of thermodynamics and that physics demands calories in calories out be true is a belligerent and arrogant fool.
If you are a physicist then you are an exceptionally dull one. There is no physical law that determines what the human body does with the molecules it ingests. It can turn those molecules into fat or energy, in any ratio, or send the molecules right back out without even using them. This is a matter of metabolics and hormones, not physics. Calories in calories out is bullshit. Not because it isn’t broadly a good heuristic but because it isn’t based on any kind of biological axiom and is very often misused.
Usually when people say this, they mean (on behalf of themselves or someone else) "I couldn't lose weight even if I ate less, I am genetically fat". That's not physically possible. All humans have the ability to lose weight by eating less, because calories are not magic, they are bound to laws of physics (particularly conservation of energy). Yes, it will be easier for some people and harder on other people. But there is no human out there who will magically stay fat even though they are eating nothing but water.
Again, you are wrong. It has nothing to do with physics. A human body is completely capable of remaining fat in the event of the cessation of eating. A person can die of starvation while fat and die in a fat body. The metabolic machinery of the human body is not static. It can choose to hang on to fat right up until you die. It can choose to use almost none of the food you eat to create energy. It can do anything no matter how illogical, including kill you. This is an illustration of the fact that the human body is a very precarious and complicated machine and the only reason people aren’t more aware of issues like this is because it is an insanely reliable machine — reliable enough to give us many delusions about certain aspects of ourselves being innate.
It is literally physically possible for it to be true that a person cannot lose weight even if they eat less due to a sudden and extreme metabolic pathology. Again, super bad physics.
Ok, show me 1 documented case where a fat person has died of starvation while remaining fat, despite drinking water and eating at least 500 calories per day of reasonable food (to get some nutrients that you wouldn't be able to extract out of body fat). Show me one documented case and I will change my mind and agree with you that it's possible.
No, just admit that I got you. Show me a single case of a persons skin being green from birth. So are we supposed to think it’s physically impossible for the human body to make its skin green? It is well within the realm not only of physical possibility but also plausibility. A persons cells can manufacture all kinds of molecules, including green ones. Just because something is strange to you and you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it’s physically impossible. The machinery of metabolism is very complex and it controls energy and fat utilization. It’s the machinery that drives the metabolic behavior of the human body, not the laws of thermodynamics. I’m right.
You say you want to see a fat person starve. You also need to see the one million other malfunctions of biological pathways that are responsible for the behavior that we are used to seeing in the human body. There are one million things we have never seen because of the astounding reliability of the human body as a machine. Just because you haven’t seen these malfunctions doesn’t mean that there’s nothing under the hood.
If you want to see an example of metabolic disorder that is even more strange, even more bizarre then look at African sleeping sickness. If you think that it’s too weird for a person to not burn fat, how about a person who cannot make energy of any kind out of what he eats?
You make an incredulous claim, I'm asking you to show evidence for it (just a single case). You refuse to show evidence, and you think that you "got me"? How did you get me exactly? You made claims and refused to back them up. As far as I know, you're just talking hot air.
> The machinery of metabolism is very complex and it controls energy and fat utilization. It’s the machinery that drives the metabolic behavior of the human body, not the laws of thermodynamics.
The human body is not magically immune from laws of physics. That said, laws of physics don't prevent the human body from consuming fat during starvation, so you could be right. Then again, if you were right, there would be a documented case of this happening... but I wasn't able to find one.
> You say you want to see a fat person starve. You also need to see the one million other malfunctions of biological pathways that are responsible for the behavior that we are used to seeing in the human body. There are one million things we have never seen because of the astounding reliability of the human body as a machine. Just because you haven’t seen these malfunctions doesn’t mean that there’s nothing under the hood.
Is it theoretically possible that a human - at some point in history - has had this specific malfunction? Sure! You "got me" there. Now, if my neighbor chats me up next to the mailbox and talks about how they are physically unable to lose weight because of their genes, what do you think is the probability of that being true? Sure, theoretically she may have a "malfunction" that only 1/100000000 humans exhibit, sure. But I wouldn't be money on it.
I didn’t just get you, I dunked on you. If your neighbor says he has more trouble losing weight than other people controlling for calories and exercise, this is very plausible. And it certainly isn’t outside the realm of physical law.
> If your neighbor says he has more trouble losing weight than other people controlling for calories and exercise, this is very plausible. And it certainly isn’t outside the realm of physical law.
Now you're just moving the goalposts. I said this exact thing in the beginning of this thread: "Yes, it will be easier for some people and harder on other people." The point of contention was not "is losing weight harder for some people" (because we agree on that), the point of contention was "is losing weight impossible for some people". If you took a survey of every person on earth, grouped the people who said that it's "impossible" for them to lose weight, and then put them on a diet, how many people do you expect to find for whom losing weight is literally impossible? You can't even find a SINGLE example.
> I didn’t just get you, I dunked on you.
If you take pride in "dunking" on people, maybe you should inspect your values.
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?
> 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.
> 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
I'm aware that this is a community driven site but it's becoming more and more a place for discussing generally interesting things. I'd prefer to keep the focus on IT topics and comments with informationial character.
Particurly I don't think this should be a forum for chats and personal anecdotes.
