Tarrare
In the late 18th century, a French man with an insatiable appetite became one of history's strangest documented medical cases. Known only as Tarrare, he could consume quantities of food that defied explanation, and despite eating constantly, he remained thin and perpetually hungry.
Tarrare's parents could not afford to feed him and turned him out as a teenager. He survived by joining traveling performers, where he swallowed corks, stones, and live animals as a sideshow act. When the French Revolutionary Wars began in the 1790s, he enlisted in the army, but standard military rations left him starving. He was hospitalized with exhaustion and granted quadruple portions, which still did not satisfy him.
Military surgeons saw an opportunity for research. Dr. Pierre-François Percy, surgeon-in-chief, documented experiments in which Tarrare consumed a meal prepared for fifteen laborers in a single sitting, then fell asleep. On another occasion, he ate an entire live cat, leaving only the bones. Hospital staff presented him with snakes, lizards, and other animals, all of which he consumed.
The French military eventually found a use for him. Tarrare was commissioned as a spy, tasked with swallowing a document in a box and carrying it past Prussian lines. The mission failed—he spoke no German and was quickly captured. After a mock execution and severe beating, he was released and returned to the hospital begging for a cure.
Percy tried laudanum, wine vinegar, and tobacco pills. Nothing worked. Tarrare began scavenging for offal outside butcher shops and competing with stray dogs for scraps. Inside the hospital, he was caught drinking blood from patients and attempting to eat corpses in the morgue. When a toddler disappeared from the hospital, Tarrare was suspected and chased from the premises.
He resurfaced four years later at a hospital in Versailles, now dying of tuberculosis. The autopsy that followed revealed organs of abnormal size and a body cavity that had essentially decayed before death. Percy published his findings in 1805 under the title "Mémoire sur la polyphagia." Modern physicians have proposed various explanations—hyperthyroidism, brain damage, genetic disorders—but Tarrare's condition has never been definitively diagnosed.