Tarrare
As a child, Tarrare had a huge appetite and by his teens could eat a quarter of a bullock in a single day. His parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes, before becoming the warm-up act to a travelling charlatan. In this act he would swallow corks, stones, live animals and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.
About Tarrare in brief
As a child, Tarrare had a huge appetite and by his teens could eat a quarter of a bullock in a single day. His parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes, before becoming the warm-up act to a travelling charlatan. In this act he would swallow corks, stones, live animals and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer. At the start of the War of the First Coalition, he joined the French Revolutionary Army, where even quadruple the standard military ration was unable to satisfy his large appetite. 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 live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was underweight, and with the exception of his eating habits he showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament. He reappeared four years later in Versailles with a case of severe tuberculosis, and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.
At 17 he weighed only 100 pounds. When he had not eaten, his skin would hang so loosely that he could wrap the fold of his abdomen around his waist. His body was stinking to the touch; he was constantly sweated heavily; he could hold 12 eggs or 12 corks in his mouth or 12 apples in his nose. His skin of his cheeks was wrinkled and hung loosely, and when he was full, his abdomen would distend into a huge balloon-like shape. He could not speak German, and on his first mission was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten, and underwent a mock execution before being returned to French lines. On one occasion the act went wrong and he suffered severe intestinal obstruction. Members of the crowd carried him to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where he was treated with powerful laxatives. He made a full recovery and offered to demonstrate his act by eating his surgeon’s watch and chain; M. Giraud, the surgeon, was unimpressed by the offer and warned him that if he did so, he would cutTarrare open to recover the items. He died in 1788, at the age of 17, and was buried at the Cimetière du Grand-Duchesse in Paris, in front of a crowd of 2,000 people.
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This page is based on the article Tarrare published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
