All the polyphagists whose wonderful deeds are recorded in history are superseded by the famous Tarrare, who was known to all Paris and who died at Versailles at the age of twenty-six years...The rest of the story can be read at Lapham's Quarterly. Original source: the Society of Physicians, from The Eclectic and Analytic Review.
At seventeen years of age, Tarrare weighed only one hundred pounds and was already able to eat, in twenty-four hours, a quarter of a bullock of that weight... One time on the stage, he defied the public to satiate him, and ate in a few minutes a pannier-full of apples, furnished by one of the spectators; he swallowed flints, corks, and all that was presented to him...
He swallowed a large eel alive without chewing it, but we thought we perceived him crush its head between his teeth. He ate, in a few instants, the dinner prepared for fifteen German laborers... M. Comville, the surgeon-major of the hospital where Tarrare then was, made him swallow a wooden case, enclosing a sheet of white paper: he voided it the following day by the anus, and the paper was uninjured...
The general-in-chief had him brought before him, and after having devoured in his presence nearly thirty pounds of raw liver and lights, Tarrare again swallowed the wooden case, in which was placed a letter to a French officer, who was a prisoner to the enemy. Tarrare set out, was taken, flogged, imprisoned; voided the wooden case, which he had retained thirty hours, and had the address to swallow it again, to conceal the knowledge of its contents from the enemy...
The servants of the hospital surprised him drinking the blood of patients who had been bled, and in the dead room devouring the bodies...
If it weren't for his somewhat slender physique, it would appear he had Prader-Willi syndrome, which has among other symptoms an insatiable appetite (a decreased mental capacity is also not unusual).
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