The Insatiable Soldier: Tarrare and the Bizarre Appetite That Baffled History

In 1792, the French Revolutionary Army recruited a soldier who could eat his own body weight in a single day, and still be starving. Now, in our last episode, we talked about the Australian army losing a war to a flock of emus, which felt like peak military absurdity. But what happens when the absurdity isn't the enemy… but the recruit himself? His name was Tarrare. And he is one of the great, unsolved medical mysteries in history. Born near Lyon around 1772, he was kicked out of his home as a teenager because his parents literally could not afford to feed him.

He had a condition we’d call extreme polyphagia—an insatiable, unending appetite. But that doesn't even begin to cover it. He weighed about a hundred pounds, and he ate about a hundred pounds of food a day, yet he never gained weight. He was described as having an abnormally wide mouth with almost no lips, and skin so loose that when his stomach was empty, he could wrap the folds of it around his own waist. And the smell… he apparently stank so badly that people couldn't stand to be within twenty paces of him. He became a street performer, because what else do you do?

He’d swallow a whole sack of apples, one by one. Then corks. Then stones. Then he moved on to live animals. The accounts say cats and dogs would flee from him on sight. One doctor, a man named Pierre-François Percy, watched him grab a live cat, tear its stomach open with his teeth, drink its blood, and eat the entire thing—leaving only the skeleton. He swallowed a whole eel without chewing. It just… went down. So when he joins the army, they think, maybe this is useful? They quadruple his rations, it does nothing. He's still starving, scavenging for garbage, fighting stray dogs for scraps.

So they bring him to the hospital, not as a patient, but as an experiment. They feed him a meal meant for fifteen laborers. He eats it all, his stomach balloons up like a massive ball, and then he just… falls asleep. They try to cure him. Laudanum, tobacco pills, wine vinegar. Nothing works. His hunger is a law of physics. This is where you look for a pattern, right? Where have we seen this before? You think of modern competitive eaters, maybe. But that analogy breaks down instantly. They train. They have techniques. And crucially, they stop. For Tarrare, there was no stopping.

It wasn't a sport; it was a prison. So the army tries one last thing. They decide he'll be the perfect spy. They’ll have him swallow a wooden box with a secret message, cross enemy lines, and… deliver it out the other end. He’s captured almost immediately. The Prussians beat him, he panics, and he passes the box ahead of schedule. They open it. The message inside just asks the recipient to confirm if the box arrived safely. It was a test. A total failure. And here’s the turn. After the spy fiasco, he goes back to the hospital, and his desperation hits a new low.

He's caught drinking the blood drawn from other patients. He's seen sneaking into the morgue to eat the bodies. He’s eating the dead. This is where the story shifts from a medical curiosity to something genuinely terrifying. Then, a one-year-old toddler vanishes from the hospital. And everyone looks at Tarrare. There’s no proof, but the suspicion is so strong, so plausible, that he’s chased out of the hospital for good. Four years later, in 1798, a doctor in Versailles is told about a patient on his deathbed. It’s Tarrare. He’s dying of tuberculosis, but he thinks his condition is caused by a golden fork he swallowed two years earlier and never passed.

He dies. And the doctors, horrified but compelled, perform an autopsy. They reported that his throat was so wide they could see directly down into his stomach. His liver and gallbladder were enormous. His stomach itself was massive, covered in ulcers, and filled most of his abdominal cavity. The whole room, the whole corpse, was filled with pus and emitted a stench so foul the lead surgeon gave up and refused to go any further. They never found the golden fork. There’s no tidy explanation. No modern diagnosis that perfectly fits. He wasn't a monster, not really.

He was just a man whose own body was a black hole. A biological singularity. Some people are defined by what they create; Tarrare was defined by what he consumed, until there was nothing left.