If overeating is a sin, then a man named Tarare is a terrible sin!
This dude is from 18th century France.
Since his appetite was so great, in order to suppress hunger, he ate everything, even live cats and rotting corpses.
Rumors were that he could eat beef equivalent to his entire weight in one day, but still felt hungry.
No one remembers what Tarare's real name was, but everyone called him Tararelli.
Tarare was just a popular expression in French at the time, "Bom-bom tarare", generally used to describe "a powerful explosion".
Because of the way the old man's stomach bulges after eating in this article, it is really scary.
Therefore, the French at that time gave him this nickname.
Tarare was born in 1772 on the outskirts of Lyon, France.
Because he was so able to eat, he scared his parents.
Finally, when he was a teenager, his parents swept him out of the house.
In the years that followed, Tararé embarked on a trip to France.
To put it bluntly, he had to go around begging.
He mingled in the ranks of thieves and prostitutes, begging and stealing food.
Finally, in "This Trip", he met a jianghu langzhong.
The quack doctor's clever words eventually led Tarare to agree to a "devouring" show:
Stones, cork stoppers and live animals... As long as it is a performance that can attract people, Tarare will not hesitate to swallow it.
He was very gluttonous and was said to have a special fondness for snake meat.
In 1788, he moved to Paris to work as a street performer, performing similar stunts.
But after a show, Tarare suffered from severe intestinal obstruction.
As a result, he had to be carried to the hospital for treatment with powerful laxatives.
In that era, this kind of treatment experience was definitely not comfortable, it could directly kill you.
Fortunately, Tarare was lucky that he actually recovered.
However, Tarare does not seem to care about his dangerous professional experience, nor does he intend to give up.
He even showed off his "special skills" with the surgeon who operated on him.
He proposed to his doctor that he wanted to show off his talents by swallowing the surgeon's watch and gold chain.
However, the surgeon was not amused and replied slightly threateningly that if he did, he would cut Taray to reclaim his property.
In 1792, the First Allied War of The French Alliance took place on the European continent.
In order to earn a living, Tararé joined the French army.
Unfortunately, the military food was not enough to satisfy his appetite.
He began on missions for other soldiers in exchange for their rations and searched for scraps of food in the dung heap.
The army's frugal diet made him extremely tired, and finally "starved" and was taken to the hospital.
So the doctor increased his rations fourfold, but he was still hungry.
He lurked in gutters and dumpsters in search of food, then sneaked into the pharmacist's room to eat the ointment.
The military doctors, including professor Percy, the attending physician at the hospital, were stunned by his appetite.
He was ordered to stay in the hospital so that the doctors could study him more closely.
To find out exactly how big his appetite really was, the researchers conducted experiments.
Our Tarare dude unceremoniously ate a meal that would have served 15 people, plus a little "dessert": two large meat pies, a plate of grease and salt, and four gallons of milk.
Then Tararei fell asleep contentedly.
On another occasion, he got a live cat.
The "hungry" Tarare tore open the cat's abdomen with his teeth, drank its blood, and then ate the whole cat, leaving only the bones, and finally spit out its fur and skin.
He has also eaten a variety of other animals, including snakes, lizards, and puppies.
He swallowed the whole eel before he could chew it.
Despite his big appetite, Tarare never seems to have gained weight.
He is slim and of medium height. In his teenage years, he weighed just over 90 pounds.
The only thing that could explain his staggering amount of food was his unusually wide mouth.
At the same time, the skin on the abdomen is loose and crumbling like a huge leather bag, which can be wrapped around the waist ("lifebuoy").
But don't underestimate this "lifebuoy", which can swell in amazing ways after a hearty meal in Tarare.
As Dr. Percy, who experimented on him at the time, described,
"He was often in a state of sweat, and his body was always surrounded by a strong stench that he could not bear it at a distance of twenty paces."
In fact, Tarare would become more smelly after eating, his eyes and cheeks would be covered with blood, and a visible vapor would rise from his body.
After a few months in hospital, the Military Commission asked how long It would take for Tarare to return to work.
But Passy was reluctant to lose such a fascinating object of study.
So he came up with a strange plan to use Tarare's body to deliver documents.
I'm a good one!
As a result, Tarare was asked to swallow a wooden box containing documents.
Two days later, the box was removed from his feces, and both the box and the documents were intact.
After a successful repetition of the experiment at The French Army Headquarters, Tararé took on a new role as a spy.
His first task was to convey a message to a French colonel imprisoned in a Prussian fortress.
Although the general knew that Tararay was a valuable asset, he still did not want to entrust him with any documents that were really important.
So the glutton was tricked into swallowing a simple note telling the imprisoned French colonel that all possible information about the movements of the Prussian army was sent back by the same messenger.
As the general suspected, Tarare was arrested outside the city.
Poor Tarare was stripped and whipped, but he still didn't sell his cargo.
But the Prussians had a way to get the prisoners to speak, and Tarare was relieved within 24 hours and confessed the secret.
As a result, Tarare was taken to the toilet, and eventually, 30 hours after being swallowed, the wooden box appeared.
Even so, the Prussians brought Tarare back to the French army.
But Tarare, frightened by the torture, could no longer refuse to swallow the wooden box.
He returned to the hospital and begged Dr. Passy to cure him.
Unfortunately, all known methods—opium tinctures, sour liquor, tobacco pills, and plenty of half-cooked eggs—did not affect Tarare's appetite.
Dr. Passy tried to get Tarare to control his diet, but was unable to suppress hunger.
He would sneak out of the hospital, look for offal outside the butcher's shop, and look for carrion with stray dogs in gutters, alleys and garbage dumps.
He even drank the blood of other patients who were bleeding and was caught eating corpses in the morgue several times.
Other doctors complained that Tararay should be sent to an insane asylum, but Percy insisted he stayed in the hospital.
But when a 14-month-old child mysteriously disappeared, Tarare immediately became a suspect.
This time even Percy could not defend him, and angry doctors and porters drove Tararay away.
In 1798, Tarare appeared in a hospital in Versailles.
Percy went to see him and found him weak and bedridden.
Tararay told Percy he had swallowed a golden cross two years ago, which he thought had stuck inside him and caused his current weakness, but Percy recognized him as having advanced tuberculosis.
A month later, Tarey suffered from terrible diarrhea.
He died a few days later.
The body decayed so quickly that the surgeons at the hospital were reluctant to dissect him.
However, the chief surgeon of the Hospital of Versailles overcame his disgust and opened the body.
He found Tarare's esophagus unusually wide, filling most of the abdominal cavity.
When his jaw was forcibly opened, the surgeon could see a wide pipe entering the stomach.
But the golden cross was not found over there.
The cause of Tarare's extreme overeating has never been diagnosed.
He may have hyperthyroidism or some kind of endocrine disorder.
Polyphagiarism or abnormal hunger is one of the most common symptoms of diabetes, which disrupts the body's ability to convert glucose from food into energy.
Ingesting food can lead to an increase in glucose levels without a corresponding increase in energy, leading to a constant feeling of hunger.
The validity of these claims has also been questioned, but Dr. Percy was the chief surgeon of the French Army, a university professor, inventor of an important battlefield medical device, and a reputable doctor.
His personal documents about Tarare were considered credible enough to be published in prestigious medical journals of the time, such as Medical Research, The Great Biophysics, and the London Journal of Medicine and Physics.
Tarare isn't the only such case in history.
Less than thirty years after Tararé's death, a man named Antoine Langulette was arrested by the Paris police and sent to a mental hospital.
He was also a tall and skinny guy, probably over 150 pounds.
People at the time knew that Langulette liked to eat some of the most disgusting things.
He preferred carrion on corpses blown away by flies over fresh steaks.
He lurked in his humble dwelling during the day, but after dusk he ventured out to sweep the streets, collecting offal and rotting flesh from gutters, and then stuffing his stinking treasure into his pocket.
In addition, a medical journal talks about a French soldier from Charles Domery who also had a voracious appetite.
"In a barracks outside Paris, Charles Domery ate 174 cats in a year. Dogs and rats are equally tormented by his relentless jaws, and he eats 4 or 5 pounds of grass a day if bread and meat are scarce. He prefers raw meat to cooked or boiled meat, and raw beef liver is his favorite dish. While moving on one of the ships of the course, another sailor's leg was hit by a shell, and Domery grabbed it and began to feed it as much as he pleased, until the other sailor pulled it off him in disgust and threw it into the sea. ”
Due to the availability of modern diagnosis and treatment, extreme examples of this polyphagia may no longer appear today.