Il Volo in concert, Saturday, November 21st, TD Coliseum. Experience an unforgettable evening of soaring arias, classic Italian melodies, and beloved crossover hits. Join Il Volo on a musical journey filled with sensational harmonies you won't forget. Visit Ticketmaster.com today and experience Il Volo in concert, presented by Gelt Productions.
This episode was suggested by a listener, Emily. If you'd like to suggest a topic, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at morbidcuriositypodcast, on Twitter at morbidpodcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com. This episode contains discussions about bowel movements, the consumption of live animals, and cannibalism. If any of these topics aren't something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip.
Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast.
Have you ever watched an eating contest and been disgusted, but also fascinated? You can't stop watching as the participants consume copious amounts of food as fast as they can. These eating challenges are more common today online. Hundreds of people participated in challenges on YouTube where they consumed food and non-food items, such as heaps of cinnamon and Tide Pods.
Don't eat either of these, by the way, it's not safe and sometimes results in death. This type of challenge, however, is nowhere near new. Consuming strange things for cash was not uncommon in the 17th and 18th centuries. As part of sideshows for quack medicine peddlers, known colloquially as snake oil salesmen, eaters would travel the country consuming things like rocks, large amounts of food, and sometimes live animals.
Gruesomely, cats were a popular choice for these events. An example of one of these professional eaters was Nicholas Wood, also known as the Great Eater of Kent. It was recorded that in one sitting, he ate 60 eggs, a whole slab of mutton, three large pies, and a large black pudding. For those who don't know, black pudding is blood sausage, and despite the name, it's delicious.
It's also very filling, as it contains oats and barley. On another occasion, it's said that Wood ate seven dozen rabbits in one sitting. One of the most well-known, most disgusting, and therefore the most fascinating of these eaters was a Frenchman named Tarare. Not only did he seem to be able to eat almost anything, but the amount he could eat was astounding.
It's been recorded that he could eat a hearty meal prepared for 15 men with ease. His true name remains unknown. According to medical historian Jan Bondeson, Bon Bon Tarare was an expression that was used at the time to describe explosions. Tarare may have earned this nickname due to his explosive flatulence or diarrhea.
Before we get into the details of his life, it should be noted that most of what we know about Tarare comes from second-hand sources. Only one article was published by the physician who observed him, Dr. Pierre François Le Baron Percy, around 1804 in a French medical journal of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy. Because of this first-hand account, we know Tarare existed and a little about his condition, but it's not known if these details were exaggerated or not, as there are no other sources to corroborate them.
Dr. Percy was a highly regarded French physician and surgeon, and was chief surgeon for the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. He published many works on medicine and surgery, but his article on Tarare is unique in comparison. While it's likely he performed the same good research for this case study as he did for his other work, it's still the only account we have.
Also, while Dr. Percy did the best he could for his time, he couldn't answer the question of how Tarare was able to eat the way he did. Modern researchers have many hypotheses, but they too are not completely sure. Dr.
Percy's account was summarized in English in the London Medical and Physical Journal, Volume 42, in 1819. The entry about Tarare is contained within another article entitled, A Collection of Rare and Interesting Cases, and under the heading, polyphagism, a condition I'll talk about more after the ad break. It's this article that I was able to access, as I'm unable to speak French, and automated translations of medical texts are dodgy at best. Translation to English for this article could also have changed or exaggerated some words of Dr.
Percy's original work, so that must also be kept in mind. Side note, a huge thank you to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Center for Biotechnology Information for digitizing and curating all these old journals. It made my research so much easier.
One other English source that appears to be reliable, in that it didn't deviate from the London article, is a collection of medical oddities published in 1896, almost 100 years after Dr. Percy's account, written by George M. Gould and Walter Little Pyle. The rest of the articles about Tarare appear anecdotal at best, containing the basic information from the London journal article and adding other small details.
I don't usually like to do episodes where there's only one reliable source amongst a lot of hearsay, but I found Tarare so interesting that I decided to go for it anyway. Just know that much of his story may be exaggerated. According to the London Journal's translation of Dr. Percy's article, Tarare grew up somewhere near Lyon in France, which lies southeast of Paris.
He was either thrown out or left home at a young age and took up with a group of miscreants, begging and stealing to sate his already immense appetite. At the age of 17, he weighed only 100 pounds, but could eat a quarter of a cow in 24 hours. He eventually joined a traveling show, his job being to draw a crowd by challenging them to fill his belly or find something that he couldn't eat. He ate flints, corks, anything that was given to him by the crowd.
On one occasion, he ate an entire bushel of apples, one by one, in one sitting. When the French Revolutionary Wars began in 1792, Tarare joined the French military. The politics and movements involved in the French Revolutionary Wars are quite complicated, but I'll try to summarize for context. The wars resulted from the French Revolution, in which Marie Antoinette supposedly said, let them eat cake, to her starving and penniless subjects who complained they were without bread.
The French monarchy was overthrown and a new republic was installed. Fearing similar revolutions would spread over their own borders, Austria and Prussia sent troops to the French border and refused to recall them. France therefore declared war on Austria and Prussia. After a series of victories over these two countries, France was eventually defeated in 1793.
This led to the Reign of Terror, which eventually unified the French nation and led to a victory over Austria, Prussia, and Italy in 1796, thanks in large part to the then relatively unknown general, Napoleon Bonaparte. At first, Tarare did well in the new French army. He ate the rations that were allotted him, but he quickly became ill due to what appeared to be starvation. He was taken to the military hospital at Saults.
There, Dr. Pierre-François Percy and a Dr. M. Corville, the surgeon major of the hospital, attempted to treat him.
It was at this time that Dr. Percy recorded his notes about Tarare. He describes Tarare as a young man of medium height and slender build, aged about 26. The small amount of hair he had was fair and quite fine.
He had sallow cheeks streaked with wrinkles, possibly due to stretching them around large quantities of food. His mouth was large, but his lips were so thin that they were barely visible. He sweat constantly, but even more so after feasting. He also smelled awful, and Dr.
Percy said it was nearly possible to see the scent rising off him and that his scent could be detected from 20 paces away. Tarare's bowel movements were always loose and gave off an even more foul stench. When he hadn't eaten, the stretched-out skin of his stomach could be wrapped almost completely around his torso. If he ate a small meal, he could be quick and quite active, but when full, Tarare's smell grew even more powerful.
He sweat profusely and his cheeks and eyes went red. He also grew very sleepy and slow, and belched loudly and often. As for his intelligence and personality, Dr. Percy is said to have stated that Tarare was, quote, devoid of force and of ideas, end quote.
At the hospital, Tarare was given four times the rations of a normal soldier, but still he sought out scraps from other patients and from the kitchens. Even with this immense supply of food, he was still hungry. He broke into an apothecary and ate all the poultices and medicines inside. One day he ate a live cat in front of the chief army physician, Dr.
Lawrence. The physicians then began giving him more and more disgusting things to eat to see if he would do it. He ate a live eel, crushing its head as he swallowed it. He ate lizards, snakes, and is rumored to have eaten a puppy.
It was during these experiments that Tarare supposedly ate a meal prepared for 15 laborers. After he did so, he went to sleep, and when he woke, he showed no sign of stomach issues. It was noted that any time he ate such an immense amount, his sad life indeed. Still, the cause of all his woe remains a mystery, one that fascinates physicians and the public alike.
To this day, there is no clear medical condition that fits the description of Tarare's behavior and his organs, but there are several theories. Before we get into those, however, let's pause for a word from our sponsor. Our regular sponsor is Audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
In fact, there are over 180,000 of them to choose from, which you can listen to on your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or other mp3 players. MCP listeners can get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial of Audible.com by going to www.audibletrial.com slash MCP. You can also find this link on our Facebook page and website. If you sign up for the free trial, you get a free audiobook that is yours to keep, even if you cancel the service as soon as you finish downloading it, and the MCP gets the funding it needs to keep bringing morbid history to your ears.
So go get your free audiobook on us. Lastly, if you like this podcast, why not sponsor the MCP yourself by becoming a patron on Patreon? Over 45,000 people download this podcast every month, but only around 140 people are supporting us on Patreon. For a mere $1 an episode, that's $2 a month, you can get ad-free episodes, bonus behind-the-scenes info, give your opinion by answering polls, have access to all the horror story readings, and get updates on past episodes.
For $3 an episode, you get monthly outtake reels. For $5, you get a monthly quiz episode, where I quiz my husband on past episodes. For $10, you get a detailed bibliography of all the resources I've used while researching an episode. And for $20, you get a bit of miscellaneous morbidity, a short essay on a random morbid topic every month.
Previously, we have reviewed horror video games and television shows, discussed the plague pits of London, and tried out historic recipes from previous episodes. All of these rewards aside, your patronage supports the podcast and keeps new episodes coming. I can't keep doing this podcast without you, so go to bit.ly slash morbid patron, that's bit.ly slash morbid patron, to choose your rewards and support the MCP. You'll have my eternal gratitude.
And now, back to the podcast. I'm not a medical doctor, but I do know how to research and for the most part interpret what medical doctors have written about Tarare. Again, there aren't many peer-reviewed articles by modern physicians, but there are books, conversations, and speculations by medical practitioners theorizing about what it could have been. As I'm basically a librarian of strange and dark history, I was able to locate some of these discussions.
Still, these discussions haven't been peer-reviewed, and as we can't go back in time to diagnose Tarare, take what I have to say as educated guesses about what ailed him. Before we delve into diagnosing Tarare, I'd like to mention the many exaggerated tales of his exploits. Gould and Pyle wrote in 1896 that when Tarare ate the cat, he later coughed up the bones and fur, quote, in the manner of birds of prey, end quote. Other rumors included that Tarare died from eating a golden fork and that tuberculosis is what killed him.
I'm not sure where the golden fork one came from, but the tuberculosis rumor may have come from a misinterpretation of the term tabid, or the assumption that any wasting disease in this era must have been tuberculosis. In order to narrow down what might have caused Tarare's symptoms, I'd like to summarize them briefly. I'll start with the symptoms that were noted while he was alive. He was constantly hungry, he was able to eat an enormous amount of food and non-food items, he was able to pass non-food items without difficulty, his abdomen would swell when he was full and deflate when he was empty, he had malodorous diarrhea, strong body odor, he sweat a lot, profusely after feasting, and was physically quite weak.
He also had a large mouth, fair, fine hair, and appeared rather thin when he wasn't full. At his death, he seemed to be wasting away, which could have been due to starvation or some sort of disease. During his brief autopsy, it was recorded that Tarare's gullet, or esophagus, was so large that you could see into his stomach by just looking into his mouth. The lining of his stomach was covered in ulcers and pus, his stomach, liver, and gallbladder were enlarged, and his organs seemed to putrefy more quickly than normal.
It was recorded that there was hesitation in doing an autopsy due to the stench, so it's not known how long after his death the autopsy occurred. The first physician to evaluate Tarare, Dr. Percy, wrote that Tarare was afflicted by polyphagia. Today, this term means excessive hunger.
Polyphagia, also known as hyperphagia, is usually the result of a neurological anomaly causing gross overeating associated with an abnormally strong desire or need to eat. Reading the article now, it's not known if Dr. Percy meant polyphagia as a symptom or as a specific condition. From context clues, it seems like he means it as a condition on its own, but as I'm not a physician and it's a translated article, the context clues are hard to interpret.
Today, the term polyphagia is meant as a symptom of other diseases, especially diabetes mellitus. It's also a symptom of Prader-Willi syndrome, Klein-Levin syndrome, and Graves' disease. Diabetes mellitus, usually just called diabetes, is a group of disorders in which high blood sugar levels over a prolonged period of time cause metabolic disturbances. When you eat, your body turns food into glucose.
It then uses a hormone called insulin to get glucose from your bloodstream to your cells. Your cells then use this glucose for energy and normal body functions. Diabetes occurs either when the pancreas fails to produce enough insulin, type 1 diabetes, or the cells of the body don't respond properly to the insulin produced, type 2 diabetes. The most common symptoms include frequent urination, increased thirst, and increased appetite, or polyphagia.
Because glucose cannot enter the cells to be used for energy, the person afflicted with diabetes continues to feel hunger as their body tries to meet its need for energy. Untreated, diabetes can cause many health complications, such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, chronic kidney disease, foot ulcers, damage to the nerves, damage to the eyes, cognitive impairment, and death. Prader-Willi syndrome, or PWS, is a genetic disorder that causes affected children to be constantly hungry, which often leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Mild to moderate intellectual impairment and behavioral problems can also occur.
Often, affected individuals are also short in height and have lighter skin and hair compared to the rest of their family. People with Klein-Levin syndrome, or KLS, experience recurring episodes of prolonged sleep, between 15 to 21 hours a day during episodes, which can last from a week to a month. Polyphagia and unusual cravings are present in 50 to 66% of these cases. Other symptoms include marked changes in mood and cognitive ability, severe apathy, and sometimes hallucinations or delusions.
Sometimes affected individuals also can't remember what happened during their episodes. Graves' disease is an autoimmune disease that often results in hyperthyroidism, which is another popular theory as to the cause of Terare's condition. Hyperthyroidism, or overactive thyroid, occurs when the thyroid gland, which is in the neck, produces too much of the hormone thyroxine. Thyroxine is critical to the normal function of cells.
When the thyroid gland overproduces it, metabolism is overstimulated and the normal function of the sympathetic nervous system is disrupted. The sympathetic nervous system controls the body's rapid involuntary response to dangerous or stressful situations. The excess of thyroid hormone causes various body systems to speed up. This causes a wide variety of signs and symptoms, some of which can mimic other health problems.
This can make diagnosis very difficult, even for modern physicians. Symptoms that could have been noted at the time Terare lived include increased appetite, sweating, changes in bowel patterns, especially frequent diarrhea, fatigue, muscle weakness, and fine, brittle hair. The symptoms of hyperthyroidism do seem to reflect Dr. Percy's observations.
However, hyperthyroidism can also cause anxiety, tremors, sensitivity to heat, goiter, difficulty sleeping, and thin skin. None of these were mentioned by Dr. Percy, but it's always possible that Terare had only some of the symptoms. If left untreated, hyperthyroidism can cause heart failure, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, and sometimes thyroid toxic crisis, or a thyroid storm.
Symptoms of a thyroid storm are fever, severe weakness, profuse diarrhea, delirium, seizures, and death. In his 2006 book, Freaks, The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Quay and Other Medical Marvels, Jan Bondeson speculated that Terare and other people suffering from similar conditions might be victims of a damaged amygdala or ventral medial nucleus of the hypothalamus. In a human brain, the amygdala has been shown primarily to process memory, decision-making, and emotional responses, such as fear, anxiety, and aggression. The ventral medial nucleus of the hypothalamus is involved with the recognition of feeling sated or full after eating.
It's been scientifically shown in animals that injuries to the amygdala or ventral medial nucleus can induce polyphagia. However, more testing would be needed to show this is true of humans. Even though these disorders, hyperthyroidism and Graves' disease in particular, are pretty good matches for Tarare's condition, they don't match up completely. As we have no way to test moved into the public eye thanks to the popularity of several memes about him.
The first one that rose to popularity was an image of a nervous-looking Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants with the line, that face you make when you're a 14-month-old French infant at a military hospital in the 18th century, and Tarare comes into your room. Many other memes appeared that were similar, using mostly that face you make when descriptions. Despite the length of these memes, and the research required to get the joke, Tarare memes grew quite popular for a short time. Tarare was both fascinating and disgusting, a combination that for some reason holds the attention of many, both in the past and today.
While I do not endorse emulating him by participating in ill-conceived internet challenges, I do endorse reading about Tarare and other sideshow acts. They will surprise, amuse, and enthrall you, but most importantly, they'll satisfy your morbid curiosity. The Morbid Curiosity Podcast was produced by H. Lloyd.
If you'd like to get in touch or suggest a morbid topic for me to talk about, you can tweet the show at morbidpodcast or find us on Facebook and Instagram at morbidcuriositypodcast. If you like the show, please share us on social media, and please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. Your shares and ratings help us reach new listeners and expand this creepy community. Thank you to everyone who liked, shared, and commented on social media.
People like Daniel V., Kelly, Ian, Alan A., Elliot, Shauna, Sir Sarah W. J., Neda, Scott, Forgotten News Podcast, Carolina, Simon, Tale or Treat, Joe, Trinity, Jamie, and Russell. Alex, Diane, Leanne, AJ, Penny, Jody, Deanna, Carly, Tristan, Rebecca, Katie, Rose, Alex E., and James have my eternal gratitude for becoming patrons despite the current lack of content. Thank you so much.
Also, a huge thank you to the three generous people who sent me gifts from the MCP wishlist. I received a mini desk fan and two books, one about voodoo in Louisiana and one about Tyburn, London's hanging tree. Unfortunately, there were no names on any of the receipts, so whoever sent these useful items, please DM me so I know who you are and can thank you properly. A massive thank you to Karen, who sent a handmade quilt to the MCP's PO box for the mini morbidture.
It's beautiful, thank you. Because of you, the listeners, our creepy community is growing, especially on Facebook, so head over there to engage with other listeners, make suggestions, and share creepy articles and cute pet pictures. As I said before, if you like the MCP, please consider becoming a patron on Patreon. You can also give one-time donations on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com.
There you'll also find links to all our social media and other ways to contact us, including by mail. Another way to support us is with gifts from our Amazon wishlist at bit.ly slash morbidwishlist. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash morbidwishlist. Any purchases from this list are greatly appreciated.
My name is Hallie, and until next time, thanks for listening. Did you know that everyday activities like ASMR can actually be healthy for you? Right now, you're improving your heart health, boosting your brain activities, and lowering your stress. Manulife wants you to see healthy living differently so you can live a longer, healthier life.
Visit manulife.ca slash health to learn more ways Manulife can help.