Tarrare was a French soldier in the late 1700s whose hunger never switched off, and his own doctors could not explain it. Modern medicine recognises several conditions that can wreck the body’s hunger brakes, and his case resembles some of them. But the only evidence is what doctors wrote down more than two centuries ago, so the honest answer is a short list of strong suspects rather than one confirmed cause.1PubMed. Retrospective diagnosis and the use of historical texts for investigating disease in the past
What Tarrare Ate and How Doctors Described It
Army surgeons kept Tarrare in a military hospital so they could study his appetite.2Wikipedia. Tarrare In one test he ate a meal prepared for 15 labourers: two large meat pies, plates of grease and salt, and four gallons of milk.3Wikipedia. Tarrare He fell asleep straight away, his belly stretched tight like a large balloon.4Wikipedia. Tarrare
Ordinary big eaters still feel full eventually. Tarrare seemed never to reach that point. Binge eating usually involves everyday foods and often comes with guilt, while he ate anything, including live animals.
Given a live cat, he tore it open with his teeth, drank its blood and ate everything except the bones, then vomited up the fur and skin afterwards.5Wikipedia. Tarrare Staff went on to feed him snakes, lizards and puppies, and he ate all of them.6Wikipedia. Tarrare He swallowed a whole eel without chewing after crushing its head with his teeth.7Wikipedia. Tarrare His surgeon wrote that you could only grasp his appetite by imagining everything the filthiest, most ravenous animals would eat.8Lapham’s Quarterly. An Omnivore’s Dilemma
Doctors call an appetite this extreme polyphagia, which literally means “eating much.” The word is a symptom label, like “fever,” and not a diagnosis. It names the behaviour without naming a disease behind it. A modern doctor who meets extreme hunger treats it as a clue and then looks for the cause, such as a hormone problem, a diabetes-related problem or a brain condition.
The Strange Physical Signs That Came With His Hunger
His body seemed to be running constantly hot. It was hot to the touch, and he sweated heavily all the time.9Wikipedia. Tarrare His surgeon recorded bloodshot eyes.10Ripley’s Believe It or Not!. The Medical Mystery Of Tarrare, A Cannibalistic French Spy His body odour was so foul that people could smell him from about 20 paces away.11Wikipedia. Tarrare
These signs are medically meaningful. Constant heat and sweating suggest a body burning energy at a very high rate, and a fast metabolism could explain why he stayed hungry no matter how much he ate. A strong smell can point to infection or to food rotting in the gut, which fits what his autopsy later found. Fever from infection can also produce heat and sweating, so the signs alone don’t say which cause was at work. His surgeon could only note the heat by touch and sight, since no thermometer readings or blood tests are recorded.
His body also stretched to fit the food. When he hadn’t eaten, his belly skin hung so loosely he could wrap the fold around his waist.12Wikipedia. Tarrare When full, his belly swelled like a huge balloon.13Stack Exchange. What was the biological mechanism that allowed Tarrare to eat so much? His cheeks were wrinkled and loose, and stretched out they could hold twelve eggs or apples at once.14Stack Exchange. What was the biological mechanism that allowed Tarrare to eat so much?
He was reportedly not obese despite his eating, and that mismatch is a clue in itself. Staying thin while swallowing huge amounts suggests he wasn’t keeping the calories he took in.
What His Autopsy Revealed
Tarrare was autopsied after he died, which was rare for eating cases of his era.15Wikipedia. Charles Domery His gullet was so wide that surgeons could look through his open mouth straight into his stomach.16Wikipedia. Tarrare His stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers and filled most of his belly.17Wikipedia. Tarrare His liver and gallbladder were abnormally large.18Wikipedia. Tarrare
It is hard to say whether these features were cause or effect. A huge stomach could let him eat more, but years of overeating could also have stretched it. Neither feature explains why he felt hungry, only how he managed to fit so much in.
His body was also found filled with pus.19Wikipedia. Tarrare One account describes his intestines as putrefied.20Mashed. Who Was Tarrare, The Man Who Could Eat Anything? His final illness looks like a severe infection, possibly linked to damage in his gut.
Shortly before his death he was rumoured to have swallowed a golden fork. No fork was found at the autopsy, which casts doubt on some of the wilder stories around him.
Nobody is recorded as examining his brain or thyroid, the two organs most often blamed today. So the autopsy describes the damage to his body at death more than it explains the hunger that came before.
Could Brain Damage Explain His Hunger
A small region deep in the brain controls hunger and fullness. In rats, cutting the connection between two parts of it reliably caused nonstop overeating,21PubMed. Hyperphagia in rats with cuts between the ventromedial and lateral hypothalamus because signals from one part normally tell the other to stop eating.22PubMed. Hyperphagia in rats with cuts between the ventromedial and lateral hypothalamus Temporarily blocking nerve cells in this area made rats eat, drink and gain weight for several days.23PubMed. Reversible hyperphagia and obesity following intracerebral microinjections of colchicine into the ventromedial hypothalamus of the rat In a healthy body, eating raises signals such as stretched stomach walls and rising blood sugar, and the brain reads them as “enough.” If that decision step fails, the body can send plenty of “full” signals and the brain still won’t act on them, which would produce eating without limit.
The rat findings show that the hunger brake exists and can break, not that his broke. Nobody examined his brain in a way that could show such damage.
A human brain syndrome looks partly like his case. Klüver-Bucy syndrome, caused by brain damage, includes overeating and putting objects in the mouth.24PubMed. The Neuropsychiatric Phenotype of Klüver-Bucy Syndrome: A Systematic Review of Reported Cases But it also brings unusual calmness, loss of fear and changes in sexual behaviour.25PubMed. The Neuropsychiatric Phenotype of Klüver-Bucy Syndrome: A Systematic Review of Reported Cases Some of Tarrare’s traits fit, but there’s no record of the rest of the syndrome.
The comparison is only partial. The syndrome comes from damage to certain brain regions on both sides of the brain, which is not the same as damage to the hunger centre. It is rare in people and usually follows a clear injury or illness such as a brain infection or head trauma. Tarrare’s accounts mention no obvious brain injury, and the surgeons record him as capable of working and following orders.
Hormone and Gut Explanations
Hyperthyroidism is a condition where the thyroid gland makes too much hormone and speeds up the body. It causes weight loss even though appetite goes up,26PubMed Central. Weight homeostasis & its modulators in hyperthyroidism before & after treatment with carbimazole and in one group of patients, about 8 in 10 had excessive hunger.27PubMed Central. Weight homeostasis & its modulators in hyperthyroidism before & after treatment with carbimazole It also commonly causes heat intolerance and heavy sweating. An overactive thyroid could account for his hunger, his constant heat and his thin, loose-skinned body together.
Other usual signs include a fast or racing heart, shakiness, anxiety and trouble sleeping, and the accounts of Tarrare don’t mention most of these. Today it is treatable with medicine, but in his time nothing of the kind existed.
Hunger hormones can also go wrong. The stomach makes a hormone, ghrelin, that tells the brain you are hungry. Children with Prader-Willi syndrome, a genetic condition known for constant hunger, have very high ghrelin levels.28Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology & Diabetes. The role of ghrelin in the hyperphagia of the Prader-Willi syndrome People with an overactive thyroid also had higher ghrelin than healthy people.29PubMed Central. Weight homeostasis & its modulators in hyperthyroidism before & after treatment with carbimazole
Or his gut may not have absorbed what he ate. When the pancreas doesn’t make enough digestive enzymes, food passes through without being properly absorbed.30PubMed Central. Unique causes of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency: When to consider pancreatic enzyme supplementation: A narrative review Intestinal worms such as tapeworms feed on the food in the gut.31United Digestive. 10 Warning Signs of Parasitic Infections You Should Never Ignore Either problem could leave someone hungry and thin no matter how much they eat.
Prader-Willi syndrome usually brings obesity and learning difficulties, which don’t match the accounts. The thyroid idea does not explain why he ate live animals and refuse. A brain problem plus another illness could both have been present.
A modern doctor could check these quickly. A blood test for thyroid hormone would confirm or rule out an overactive thyroid, stool tests would look for worms or poorly digested fat, and brain scans could look for damage to the brain’s hunger centre. None of these existed in the 1790s, so every suspect remains untested.
Why No One Can Diagnose Him for Certain
Doctors in the past diagnosed according to the ideas of their own time, which don’t map cleanly onto modern diseases.32PubMed. Retrospective diagnosis and the use of historical texts for investigating disease in the past For many past illnesses, a firm modern diagnosis simply isn’t possible.33PubMed. Retrospective diagnosis and the use of historical texts for investigating disease in the past Words such as “fever” or “consumption” often covered several different modern conditions. A modern doctor reading those notes has to translate old words into today’s categories, and some meaning gets lost, which is why one old description can fit several modern diagnoses equally well.
The accounts themselves vary in reliability. The main source is his surgeon Percy’s report, written by a trained eyewitness. Later retellings in popular articles add dramatic details and sometimes differ. Stories like the swallowed fork were never confirmed, so not every claim should be taken literally. The core facts, the test meal and the autopsy findings, come from the medical report itself.
No modern case of extreme appetite has been documented as severe as Tarrare’s or his contemporary Charles Domery’s.34Wikipedia. Charles Domery Doctors usually make sense of rare cases by comparing them with many similar patients, but here there are only two cases on record, both from the same period. Without modern patients of equal severity, nobody can say which condition would produce this exact picture.
How His Condition Shaped His Life as a Spy
General Alexandre de Beauharnais employed him as a courier who would swallow documents and recover them after passing through enemy lines.35Wikipedia. Tarrare Tarrare could swallow large objects without choking, which made him unusually suited to the role. In a test run he swallowed a message in a wooden box and passed it two days later.36Retrofuturista. The Man Who Could Not Stop Eating: The Syndrome of Tarrare
The weak point was the wait. The object had to pass through his gut naturally, so a captured courier could simply be held until it appeared. That is what happened. On his first mission Prussian soldiers captured him almost immediately,37World Politics History. Tarrare and they kept him chained to a latrine for about 30 hours until the box emerged.38Retrofuturista. The Man Who Could Not Stop Eating: The Syndrome of Tarrare Finding the message worthless, they beat him and staged a mock execution before sending him back.39Wikipedia. Tarrare
After his return he begged doctors to cure his hunger rather than face another mission.