Tarrare

Tarrare (* around 1772 near Lyon ; † 1798 in Versailles ) was a man from France who became known for his unusual eating skills.

Early years

Even as a child, Tarrare stood out for his excessive appetite. He left his parents' house, which could no longer support him, as a teenager and came to Paris in 1788 . On the way he ate himself by begging and stealing; in the metropolis he made his special disposition - at the age of seventeen he could already eat a quarter of beef in the course of 24 hours - to his profession and performed as a food artist. To the delight of the audience, he devoured apples in the basket, but also things that were much less edible. An acute attack of colic once brought him to the Hôtel-Dieu , where he was cured and, as a thank you, wanted to eat the watch of the attending doctor, Monsieur Giraud. He saved his property by threatening to use his sword.

During the French Revolution , Tarrare joined the mob and found enough to eat. When the First Coalition War broke out , he joined the army. At first he received their food rations from some comrades, but this did not last long, and finally Tarrare was admitted to the hospital in Soultz, half starved . There he met the doctor Courville again, who had already met him at the Hôtel-Dieu. Courville and the senior physician, Professor Percy, made Tarrare their subject of research. Although he was given four servings at a time, Tarrare was always on the lookout for other edible items. He wasn't picky about it; he also ate dogs, cats and other animals, allegedly even alive. Once, when he was given the meal prepared for a number of German workers, he effortlessly ate the portions prepared for fifteen men.

Tarrare as a spy

Courville, given Tarrare's eating skills, hit upon the idea of ​​using him for military purposes. He made him devour a box in which documents could be kept. After Tarrare had left this box intact, Courville proposed to General Alexandre de Beauharnais that his protégé should be used to transport important papers. Tarrare was allowed to demonstrate his skills at the headquarters of the French troops on the Rhine and impressed them not only by eating the box, but also by devouring a large portion of raw beef liver and lungs. He was then actually put into service as a spy. His first mission was to transport a secret document to a French colonel who was being held near Neustadt . However, Beauharnais apparently trusted the mental abilities of the newly recruited spy far less than the physical ones and only put a rather banal message in the box: The prisoner should note all troop movements of the Prussians and have Tarrare transfer them to the French army command.

Tarrare, who did not speak a word of German, was picked up by a Prussian patrol near Landau . Believing that he was carrying very important documents, Tarrare initially refused to give any information, even when he was interrogated by General Zoegli. After a day of imprisonment with the Prussians and the repeated use of force, he became weary and informed the enemy about his role in the French army, whereupon he was chained in a latrine until the box appeared. Out of disappointment with the unspectacular content, the Prussians initially wanted to execute Tarrare. But Zoegli, who was at the same time delighted by the incident, finally gave him his life. However, before being released near the French lines, he was severely beaten and cured of the idea of ​​a career as a spy.

Also, he now felt an urgent need to be cured of his extraordinary appetite. Percy tried an opium cure , then sour wine and tobacco pills, and finally Levantine soft-boiled eggs, but nothing worked: Tarrare, who was now back in the hospital, picked up waste and ate it, drank the blood of patients who had Veins had been left and assaulted the deceased in the morgue several times. Percy, against the opposition of other doctors who wanted to admit Tarrare to a mental institution, kept him in his hospital until one day a fourteen-month-old child disappeared from his bed and never reappeared. Now Tarrare has been put on the street and has been out of sight of doctors for a few years.

The end

In 1798, four years after Tarrare had left Percy's Hospital, Monsieur Tessier, the chief physician at Versailles Hospital, informed Percy that Tarrare was now in his care. Tarrare, who had always looked thin and pale, sweated unusually heavily and had a foul odor, was now suffering from terminal tuberculosis . The patient himself, who asked Percy for a consultation, attributed his miserable condition to consumption of a gold or silver fork that he had stolen and swallowed two years earlier and asked if there was no way to get the fork out of his body remove. A little later, severe diarrhea set in , from which the exhausted man soon died. Because the putrefaction set in unusually quickly and violently, the doctors initially wanted to forego an autopsy , but Tessier eventually performed the autopsy. He found no fork in Tarrare's body, only large amounts of pus . In addition, many organs were greatly enlarged or expanded. Furthermore, Tarrare had real hamster cheeks and a very stretched abdominal wall - he could wrap his stomach skin around his hips while he was alive, if he hadn't eaten full.

Others

It is not known whether "Tarrare" was the actual name of this unusual man or a nickname. Jan Bondeson who constantly between Overrides "Tarrare" and "Tararre" varies, considers it possible that the onomatopoeic "Bom-bom tarare", the sound was circumscribed by powerful explosions to the 18th century, on Tarrares flatulence applied became and led to this name. In fact, the name is written in the Dictionaire des Sciences Médicales "Tarare" and this peculiarity of his body is mentioned.

literature

• Jan Bondeson: The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and New York 2004, ISBN 0-8014-8958-X , pp. 275-280
• Perceval B. Lord: Popular Physiology; Being a Familiar Explanation of the Most Interesting Facts Connected with the Structure and Functions of Animals; and Particularly of Man. London 1839, pp. 111-113
• Dictionaire des Sciences Médicales, par une Sociéte de Médecins et de Chirurgiens. Volume 21 (Hem-Hum), Paris 1817, pp. 348-353

Web links

• Jan Bondeson, The Cat Eaters , 2001 (archived version)
• George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Physiologic and Functional Anomalies (archived version)