After being suspected of eating a one year old toddler, he was ejected from the hospital. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet he snuck out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital's morgue. Tarrare could not speak German, and on his first mission, he was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten, and subjected to a mock execution before being returned to French lines.Ĭhastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that might cure his appetite, and was treated with laudanum, tobacco-pills, wine-vinegar, and soft-boiled eggs. General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare's abilities to military use, and employed him as a courier for the French army, with the intention that he would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination.
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 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 a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. He ate any available food from gutters and rubbish heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger.
He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.Īt the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army, where even quadrupling the standard military ration was unable to satisfy his large appetite. In this act, he swallowed corks, stones, live animals, and a whole basketful of apples. He travelled France in the company of a band of sex workers and thieves before becoming the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry his parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. Tarrare ( c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelled Tarar, was a French showman and soldier noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. Doctor Pierre-François Percy's original paper on Tarrare's medical history, Mémoire sur la polyphagie (1805)
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