January 30, 2020 • 41 mins
What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten? Odds are you have nothing on the legendary Tarrare, the infamous Frenchman famous for eating everything from whole baskets of apples to rocks and — brace yourself — actual garbage. Join the guys as they dive into Tarrare's strange career, wondering how he was able to accomplish these dubious, troubling gastronomic feats.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. What's the hungriest you've ever been,
what's the most you've eaten at one time? And are
you a fan of competitive eating? I am my name's Ben.
My name is no I'd said, probably maybe a Korean
barbecue situation or an old school buffet where you really
feel compelled to get the bang for your buck. You
(00:47):
know you you've paid an amount Korean barbecue, especially because
they just keep on bringing it, and there was all
a little bond chon which I know you like little sides,
So that's a that's a recipe for gluttony. There, your Noel,
That is who I am. True. Thank you for reminding
me and the listeners. Um, that would have been a
real bund of contention if we had moved forward without
(01:08):
saying each other's names. In addition to super Bruster, Casey Pegrum,
that's right, Casey, what's the You don't strike me as
a particularly gluttonous dude. None of the three of us
are nine probably the closest. But do you recall ever
eating so much that you you felt like terrible about it? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
(01:30):
I've I've I've been in those situations a few times.
Nothing not like a competitive eating, sort of just practicing
on my own, you know, just getting getting ready for
the big day perfect maybe a family holiday situation or
something exactly exactly. But you know, I have had that
experience of paying for an extremely expensive buffet and then
(01:51):
feeling like, uh, I gotta get my money's worth. Did
that recently in Vegas? Actually I knew it, the old
Vegas Buffet and we waited like probably listed two hours
to get up to the line, and only then did
they tell us it's like a hundred dollars ahead or whatever.
It's just like, well, we're gonna be eating a lot
of crab legs and you know, just trying to maximize
our value. It's insane. I've seen people. I've seen people
(02:12):
get a ticket for Vegas Buffet and go in at
eleven and then literally hang out on the premises long
enough to just use the bathroom and get hungry again.
That's pretty much what you gotta do. But um, we
made the best of it. Is there a prime rib station? No?
Actually I was disappointed. There was not much in the
way of steak, but there were other kind of fancy
(02:35):
seafood based things ahead. I would expect. Yeah, yes, I
was expecting like filemon or something. But um, you know,
they did have enough. I don't know if we actually
covered our our our outlet for that, but you know
it was it was a good buffet anyway. Yeah, you know,
it's it's weird because the way that Vegas buffets are priced,
(02:56):
they are making a ton of money off most people,
because most people are going to eat maybe a plate
or two and then say, well, I want to go
do the Vegas stuff, right, I don't want to see
a show, go to a casino or drive to the
Hoover Damn. I uh. I've been fascinated by competitive eating
for a long time as a participant, as a participant,
(03:17):
not so much as an observer. Love it. Kobayashi, Sonya,
the Black Widow, Thomas uh, any number of people. What
one thing that's interesting about eating what makes us full
is there's a thing called the I think it's called
the safety responsive to this. It does have something to
do with like you've got to trick your body into
not telling your brain that it's full. And that's a
(03:38):
big principle of competitive eating, right, Yeah, that's why so
much of it is time. So years ago on a
YouTube show, I was doing that. I will um, I
think you've seen it, Casey, but I'm not going to
share it with anyone. I did. I did an experiment
with the sadity complex, and essentially it means it takes
(03:58):
your stomach about seventeen to twenty three minutes to tell
your brain it's full. So you can eat like a
god or a demon or a just a swirling vortex
or black hole, uh, for for up to that amount
of time, often before your body goes whoa buster. Uh.
(04:19):
Some of this is going back out right. And that's
the thing. I mean, you know, you think about Greek
Bacchanalian feasts and all of the vomitoriums and all of
that stuff. Is that is that real? I mean, is
that actually something that you can do to just continue indulging. Uh,
people have done it, but that is not healthy for you.
You know, that's that's not There's a reason we haven't
(04:40):
evolved to eat that way because ultimately it can, uh,
it can damage your system. You know. Food can be
a tough thing. Um. It's it's strange too, because we're
the more we learn about science. The more we're learning
about things we usually just took for granted or even
in some cases treated like I know this is gonna
(05:00):
be a controversial word for some of us, treated like
a freak show territory. And that's where that's where we
get to today's story. Yeah, it's true. Today's story is
about a gentleman by the name of Casey helped us
with us earlier. I think I'm gonna do my level
best Casey on the case, Casey on the case indeed,
(05:22):
which is apparently uh Are. It's thought to be a
nickname that came from a very popular French phrase which
I adore, Bom bom, which means it's sort of like
boom goes the dynamite. I think that's literally what it means.
Uh used to describe fireworks or explosives. Um and Uh.
This gentleman who we only know by was born in
(05:44):
seventeen seventy two in Leon and Um by the time
he was seventeen, despite Um reportedly being able to consume
a quarter cow's worth of beef in a single day,
he only weighed a hundred pounds, which is so that's
always fascinating me about the world of competitive eating ben
often those uh, the folks that's excel at of the
(06:05):
best are pretty slim. Yeah, yeah, it's true. There was
a rumor for a long time that Ta Caro Kobayashi,
one of the one of the very slender competitive eating champions,
was actually somehow mutated and that his stomach could expand
beneath his rib cage so for more storage space. That
(06:25):
was never confirmed as far as I know, But if
you think about it, the bigger dudes are also their
stomach has less room to expand because there's more muscle
and stuff around, right. Yeah, and uh, but the thing
about tell is he he would beyond, well beyond just
consuming beef uh and copious amounts um. He had a
(06:47):
penchant for eating just about anything. Uh and and and
we'll get to in a second. But this is actually
a condition, a very rare condition known as polyphasia UM,
which is characterized by un insatiable hunger, uncontrollable eating um
and also, again as pointed to by his slender build,
(07:09):
a very very high metabolism UM. So he parlayed this
into a career with a traveling freak show. Yeah, he
had a rough, rough life. He was kicked out of
home as a teenager, and according to a couple of reports,
he traveled around France, became a bit of a vagabond,
and at first he was traveling with bandits and sex workers,
(07:31):
and then later he became uh sort of a warm
up act to another traveling show, where he would just
he would swallow stuff. He was like that kid you
hear about in preschool or elementary school, who's eating you know,
glue or something for a dollar or whatever whatever the
going rate for glue eating is now, I don't know.
Let us know, what was it back in your glue
(07:53):
eating days? Ben, I never eat glue. Know what about you?
What was it in your day? Well, I'm more sniffed glue, um,
but I never People will pay for that, No, no
they don't. But it was a passion, a passion. I'm kidding.
I didn't do that. But but but I only asked you
about the eating glue thing is because you came clean
on this here very show about your goldfish eating days.
So I assume maybe you had other experimental eating periods
(08:15):
polyphasia D Yeah, no, no, not that much. But I
I even in my wild days, I had nothing on,
nothing on to oh gosh, no, none, few few would
or could or absolutely should. Yeah. He uh, he would
when he was doing the traveling show. As he's evolving
towards this uh you know, this kind of freak show
(08:36):
thing mentioned earlier, He would eat corks, stones, live animals.
One time he ate a whole basket of apples, which
I think whether or not that's impressive depends on the
size of the basket, doesn't it, Because there could be uh,
there could be a tiny basket, there could be a
gigantic like bushel load basket. Did he eat the basket
as well as the apples is my question? Right? I
(08:58):
think I think in that ace he just ate the apples.
But what a big finished to eat the basket. He
also was physically, he was He had some unique characteristics, right,
Like his lips are described in Messy and Chic dot
com with this great title this article with his great
title whatever you do, don't tell the French about to Od.
(09:19):
They say that he almost he had like almost non
existent lips, and he had a really wide, kind of
frog like mouth. This I had a hard time believing
his mouth could hold twelve eggs at once. Are they
chicken eggs? Again? It's like the basket. Is it a
quail egg? I can believe that. Yeah, I mean I
can only assume that they mean quail eggs. But he
(09:43):
also had another particularly stomach turning feature. Um that's a pun.
Also preparing listeners is pretty gross. His you use the
word deflated, ben, His deflated stomach sack um hung loose
in such a fast and that he could actually wrap
it around his body like a belt. Yeah. Picture that
(10:04):
for a minute, so you know how we're talking about
this South Air Probably the closest analog I could draw
as if someone has um been exercising, or for one
reason or another, they lose a lot they're they're a
very big person. They lose a lot of weight very quickly.
Your skin is just another organ, right, and so it
can still hang down or deflate because there's it's there's
(10:28):
less stuff under it than there used to be. And
for from what what we can tell, it seems like
he had been routinely eating uh so much stuff to
such an extreme that his stomach, the flesh over his
stomach had kind of naturally over time grown or expanded,
so that like like you said, nol, when he's not eating,
(10:51):
it's it's kind of like an empty tack, you know, yep. Yeah,
and then an extreme polyophasia is super super were almost
to the point where is it Isn't it kind of
almost like looked on with a little bit of suspicion,
like is it really is a really a real thing?
For some time it had been considered anecdotal. But there's
(11:13):
there's some science we can get into, uh maybe towards
the end, because science does have an answer. Uh, And
we have to tell you the story about today because
it's a story spoiler alert that you may be able
to see in the modern world as insane as it sounds. Sure, um,
so we'll definitely get to that that science. But it
(11:35):
is characterized the concept of it as someone um just
not being able to control their appetite at all. And
the extra kind of disturbing feature is that it typically
involves eating non food items. Yeah, it's it's really similar,
but it's not like uh, pica or pika. It's called
you know, when people eat clay, which is a thing
(11:56):
that happened here in the American South. Cause it's unrelenting,
it's an insatiable hunger. It's it's kind of like a
real life version of the myth of Tantalus. You know
Tantalus who was up to his chin in uh delicious liquids,
and then he's got grapes so close to his face,
and every time he tries to grab a grape or
(12:17):
a fruit or whatever, and every time he tries to
take a sip, it vanishes. It's it feels like it
goes beyond a medical condition to some sort of biblical curse. Really,
you'll eat, never be full, And that's exactly the case.
And in a big bone of contention within his household
when he was a kid, his parents had become so
frustrated with their inability to satiate him, and it was
(12:40):
honestly a financial burden. He would cry and cry and
cry even when he had just completed a massive meal.
They finally kicked him out of his house, and that
is when he kind of began that life is sort
of a nomad traveler um and leagued up with everyone
from sex workers to the fee that you mentioned, and
(13:01):
then eventually found his way into sort of the carnival
lifestyle um where he was he was taken in and
welcomed um. He became a street performer in Paris on
the pomp Neuf, and that was an area that was
considered so disreputable in CD that even known U philanderer
(13:23):
Benjamin Franklin founded too sketchy to to walk across it
as a bridge in Paris. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this
is not a super correct term nowadays. But what he
was doing, his act was pretty much it was a
predecessor to the famous, you know, circus geek acts of
(13:44):
yesteryear when someone would eat a live chicken. But he
didn't just eat live chickens. And we have firsthand accounts
of Tony's act. Here's a quote, and I warn you
this is not not super appetite scene. He sees the
live cat with his teeth event traded, that's the word, disemboweled,
(14:07):
inventraated it, sucked its blood and ate it, leaving the
bear skeleton. Only. He also ate dogs in the same manner.
On one occasion, it was said that he swallowed a
living deal without chewing it. That's disgusting. Yeah, is that
part of the show or that stuff he just did
in his own private alone times. This was part of
the show. That's that's why whenever you see a street
(14:28):
show and someone says, who has a pet in the audience,
just make for the hill desertially, definitely don't don't offer
up your your little your sheetzu. Um. That is really
disturbing and well absolutely barbaric. And I can't believe people
were into this. Uh. I would think, you know, that
would have caused people to just you know, turn and disgust.
But I guess people's appetites were pretty disgusting back in
(14:51):
those days, and they had a different, less sanitized idea
of entertainment. If you were the kind of person who
would watch this guy eat random stuff, if that was
the way you wanted to spend your afternoon, you would
have to be prepared for the smell, the aroma, the stench,
(15:14):
because although Torreto was a you know, average sized dude
and and pretty much on the skinny side, he had
a big smell. He had big smell energy. We found
something in the London Medical and Physical Journal in eighteen
nineteen describing his smell nel. Since I did the eating
(15:35):
the cat thing, do you want to handle the stench part? Yeah, okay,
I will. I will just preface by saying that this
stench followed him around his whole life. It was something
that was reported as early as when he was seventeen,
and would sneak into town to eat the cows feed.
Uh and he you know again, had had that slender build,
but always was followed around by this putrid stench. So
(15:57):
here is that quote from the London men Nicle and
Physical Journal from eighteen nineteen quote, try my best to
get through this Tar was constantly covered in sweat, and
from his body a vapor arose sensible to the site
and more so the smells so wait like stink lines
(16:21):
wow okay, and more so to the smell. He had
a wispy blonde hair and a large mouth surrounded by
slender lips and discolored teeth. He frequently burped and farted
and had constant particularly odorous Ben, why would you do
this to me? His bowel movements. I had a cat.
(16:44):
I can't I can't tell which one's worse. I think
you're right, Ben, I think maybe the cat was worse.
But sound effects of burps and farts just real quick,
or maybe it's one of those like the ship sounds
are like from rend and stimpy. When one of those
smelly looking close ups local high pressure farted exactly exactly
uh odorous bowel movements. That was my favorite member of
(17:14):
the bangor Um, which one would expect from someone who's
diet consisted of massive amounts of both food and non
food items. All right, First of all, I want to
know what one would expect from from the smell of
someone who ate non food items. Depends on the food items.
If they're just swallowing rocks, they'll probably pebbles, will probably
(17:37):
just pass through and maybe not make a big smell.
But if it's organic non food items, I would imagine
at some point it also interacts with your your microbio,
your your gut flora, so you can get some pretty
uh disgusting stuff. Today, I would have been set to
be a street for performer, you know. And and keep
(17:59):
in mind, uh, there is a history in France of
very successful performers doing things that might be disgusting to us,
like professional farters flash list, what was that guy's name?
So this is like, this is not an unusual thing
in the history of performance in France. And could today
(18:23):
I have made a living doing this, Yeah, probably, but
something intervened as as you said, he was born in
what seventeen seventy two in seventeen eighty nine, France was
racked by the French Revolution, and so today I to
join the French military. He didn't fight, He helped people
out with day to day task and then when he
(18:45):
would help them, they would give him their rations and
he would eat them. And eventually he ended up in
the military hospital because no matter what he ate, he
was still hungry, and the physicians wanted to see how
far they could go, so they quadrupled as rations. He
ate those, he was still hungry. He also ate gauze
that was intended, you know, to patch up soldiers, and
(19:08):
he ate any live animals he could find. And then
one time true story, they found him in a gutter
during his time at the hospital, shoving fistfuls of literal
garbage into his mouth. I want to also note I
don't think we hit this yet. Um, we have multiple
accounts of people saying, yeah, other than eating in the
(19:28):
disgusting smell, he was a normal dude. But he was
also super apathetic, like he didn't seem very present. A
lot of times he was just sort of like, whatever,
I'll eat it, and uh, And I think that I'm
building a case towards what I think may have been
a lower mental function, like I think maybe he wasn't,
(19:49):
uh wasn't a full set of craons. Oh, I don't
think so either. I mean definitely seemed to go hand
in hand. And it's also part of the reason why
I questioned the medical racity of this quote unquote condition. Um,
it seems like it was largely a mental condition, and
not that that makes anything any less real. I mean,
psychological conditions are are absolutely all consuming for people, and
(20:10):
they can really cause huge problems in people's quality of
life and the way they interact with others. But I
don't know that there's necessarily a physical or physiological thing
that caused him to, uh, to feel this way, other
than maybe something that was going on psychologically. Reminds me
of a condition that's depicted in the show Better called
Saul or Sault. Goodman's brother has this allergy to electricity. Um,
(20:33):
but that's largely considered by the medical community to not
be a real thing. Yeah, the E M F sensitivity,
it's right. Yeah, So you're right. In the military, he
was super problematic, but he also there were some creative
uses for him, right, There were attempts, There were attempts
to make him useful. So the weird thing is he
(20:54):
also wasn't gaining weight, by the way, still weight. I
think you mentioned earlier a hundred pounds when seventeen he
still had that ballpark weight, and he looked he was
exhibiting signs of under nourishment as a matter of fact.
So they thought, all right, we're gonna we're gonna try
to make this guy useful because he has something. It's
(21:15):
not perfect, but he has uh, he's got potential, he's
got an unusual set of skills. Right, that's right, you know,
I mean, might as well figure out how to make
some use out of the guy you gotta hang around with,
smelly dude. Let's figure out how to take his uh,
his gift, let's say, and then put it to good
militaristic use. Yep. And this is when I'm gonna muddle
through this casey I hope you're still friends at the end.
(21:37):
This is when General Alexandre du said, you know what,
no man left behind. We can give this kid something
to do. France is now at war with Prussia and
tas weird digestive condition makes him the perfect spy. So
he says, sorry, I'm putting some documents inside this would
(22:00):
box that I you're hungry, right, go ahead and eat this,
and then we'll just wait for it to pass through
your body, and then we'll have you know, whichever soldiers
in the most trouble that day go through his stool
and then fish the box out to see if you
can still read the message. This experiment worked, and so
to has given his first mission as a spy. Yes, indeed,
(22:24):
it was a noble experiment. I suppose you could say, um,
one that wouldn't ultimately be repeated. But he was disguised
as a Prussian peasant UM and asked to sneak by
enemy lines to deliver a top secret message to a
captured colonel, a French colonel. Um. The message was to
(22:46):
be enclosed in a box that was then um swallowed
whole by it till Um. But unfortunately he didn't really
make it to his destination UM, because of of the
aforementioned putrid smell did not lend itself to covert ops,
did it, Ben, Yeah, that's correct. It's it's a good point.
(23:10):
If you are a spy, you don't want to have
a unique sort of old factory tone. Let's call it
I'm searching for diplomatic ways to use the word stink. Yeah,
So they find him. He is strip searched, they whip him,
they torture him for most of a day, and then
eventually he says, okay, I'm here take a secret message,
(23:33):
you know, I'm sneaking into my in my gut, and
then people are going to find it in my poop.
It's about the war. So the Prussians literally chain him
to a toilet and they just wait, God for hours
and hours, and he still stinks, by the way, and
terras of course, starving. He has to wait until he
(23:54):
has a bowel movement. Eventually he does void uh the
wooden case and he tries, this is okay, this is
very gross is according to the London Journal. After he
couldn't hold it anymore and he passed the case, he
swallowed it again to try to keep the enemy from
getting it. They finally do get the box out of him,
(24:17):
and all they find inside is evidence that this is
a test run. The note in the little box just says, hey,
let us know if this guy today had delivered the box.
And it turns out the general still, you know, didn't
really trust the guy or this process enough he needed
some confirmed success in the field. Yeah, well, okay, good
(24:39):
on him then, because this whole thing sounded like a
real recipe for disaster if you asked me, and then
then sure enough it was. Can you imagine though, like
swallowing it back down and the whole the whole scenario.
It's just like it's like reservoir dogs gone awry or something,
you know, like chained to the toilet it. I mean,
(25:01):
I'm surprised no one's made some kind of sick version
of this movie, like a human centipede style or something.
You know. This is I should this should this should exist.
I don't know if I want to see it, but
I would support its existence as a piece of schlock cinema.
What do you think, Casey? Yeah, this is this is
right for some some schlocky goodness. Did you say, ripe? Yeah? Yeah,
(25:23):
that's the thing. The smell is a main character in
this story. Maybe that's what's holding people back. It's just
the film technology. It could be a spiritual predecessor to
the big rock movie that did so this year. Her
smell it can be called his smell. Yeah, it's just
a thought. Maybe people feel like they got tricked though.
Oh man, I was looking up so many different synonyms
(25:45):
for smell, stink, stinch, that kind of stuff, just to
get through this. Anyhow, I'm a big fan of mi
asthma myself, which I guess is a little bit refers
to more of like a big picture smell something they laugh,
you know, um proliferates a bit farther. But I could
I could you categorize what he had as a miasmas
that you can actually see the thing? Yeah, it also
(26:05):
had a miasma was for a time a medical explanation
for the spread of disease, which is very believable. You
talked about that in the episode about the Great Stink
of London. Uh, And okay, so stinking. You know, of
course there's fetted. Somebody smells fetted, right. Uh. There's also,
(26:26):
of course spoiled. They're spoiling. Uh. And I was trying
to find a particular word for that stench, that sulfurus
stench of rotten eggs. You guys know what I'm talking
to us. Yeah, I didn't find one. Oh and there's
also funk reek, fustiness, meluderous, nous o, differousness, which is
(26:49):
kind of fun and rancidity. Yeah, it's rough, but anyhow,
these are all just different words to describe what was happening.
The Prussian general, by the way, is severely po to that,
and he says, hang the guy, hang him, hang him. Immediately,
I can't believe I let that guy go. What was
I think? In a poop spy. But once he had
calmed down, he said, you know, I feel bad because
(27:12):
I see this guy so obviously again starving his whole life,
and he is openly sobbing. He's blubbering at the gallows,
and so he takes pity on to Rye and he says, Okay,
I mean, you guys just give him a very very
thorough spanking essentially and go back to the French lines.
So he returned, and he was just doing the thing
(27:34):
he did earlier. He's just like, you know, running coffee
for people. Yeah. The Prussians essentially just dumped him back
near that military hospital behind French lines. Um, and he
you know, made his case to his superiors, which I
don't think would have been too difficult to make that
he was not cut out for the spies life and
(27:55):
that he should, you know, not be asked to do
any more secret missions. He just wanted to be a
regular are smelly foot soldier right exactly. And he had
kind of a patron and a guy named Baron Percy
at the hospital, and Percy tried to satiated. He gave
him different treatments that were meant to swash his appetite,
(28:18):
and none of them were successful. I think. Uh, they
tried tobacco pills, straight up, vinegar, wine vinegar, and laudanum.
And the thing about the laudanum is I believe opiates
do actually cause constipation. So maybe that's where he was
going maybe, or you know, I can't imagine that it
(28:38):
would have been particularly comfortable to have all this weird
crap flitting around in your guts and all of the
long term damage which we will find out, you know,
was the case that it would have done to his insides. Um.
I imagine that the must have been considerable pain a
lot of the time, but you don't really see that
in the reports. But maybe that was where he was
coming from as well, with giving him a little something
(28:59):
to ease it. Yeah, and this takes a morbid turn.
We were having fun in a gross way in the
beginning of the episode, but not only did these treatments
not work, as a condition appeared to accelerate. There was
no food that was enough. He had gone past eating trash.
During one episode, he was actually caught drinking blood that
(29:25):
had been drawn from other patients in the hospital and
even nashing on some bodies in the morgue. I mean, yeah,
said at this point, it's just becoming sad and really
really really disturbing. He's almost kind of like taking on
this kind of gullum like quality where he is just
you know, becoming more and more inhuman. And that is
when the disappearance of a fourteen month old baby began
(29:48):
to generate rumors that Tarar had had somehow gotten a
hold of the baby and and actually eaten it. I mean,
you can't make this stuff up, man. It's uh, that
was at the that was was at the very hospital
that he was admitted to. That's right. And at this
point it's finally too much for Baron Percy. TDAD has
(30:09):
in his mind crossed a line. Even if the historically
we can't confirm this story of the fourteen month old
baby disappearing, everybody believed it in the hospital, right, and
you can see why it's not like they just came
up with a cockamami conspiracy theory. So Baron Percy kicks
(30:35):
Tarad out the same way that his parents kicked him
out was when he was a teenager, and he has
to fend for himself from then on. He falls off
the radar, is off the grid for like four years,
and then one day Baron Percy hears from him again.
He Trado has turned up in a hospital in Versailles. Yeah,
and he was at this hospital because he was in
(30:56):
fact dying. Um. This is something that I would have
thought would have happened much sooner, just considering, you know,
all of the crazy stuff he put in his body,
and that he put his his his digestive track through.
I can't imagine that he was healthy, um at all.
And Baron Percy, who was Baron Percy to him in
the first place, Ben skin of his his patriot, his
(31:19):
benefactor at the hospital, I see, so he he was
with him at this point. Um. And he died ultimately,
uh torout did of tuberculosis in at the young age
of twenty six. Um. And this is probably one of
the most uh nauseating parts of the story. But they
(31:42):
you know, he was absolutely a a fascination and something
that medical science could potentially learn something from. So and
of course just just an autopsy is something that happens anyway.
But he was uh cut open, and there are some
descriptions of his autopsy that are really really graphic and
(32:03):
just you know, they really paint a picture of what
was going on inside this man's body. So I guess
this one falls to me. Split it's that's the set up.
Let's see how long it goes. All right, there's two,
so yeah, I'll do the second one. Let's go back. Okay,
that's that's equit. And this is from all That's Interesting
dot com these accounts, but this is official, very real
(32:26):
accounts of what this autopsy was like. The entrails were putrified,
confounded together, and immersed in pus. The liver was excessively large,
void of consistence, and in a putrescent state. The gall
bladder was of considerable magnitude. The stomach in a lack state,
(32:46):
and having ulcerated patches dispersed about it covered almost the
whole of the addominal region um. His stomach, they found,
was so massive that it very nearly filled his entire
ab nominal cavity. His gullet, likewise, was unusually wide, and
his jaw could stretch so wide open that, as the
(33:08):
reports put it, a cylinder of a foot and circumference
could be introduced without touching his palette. That's insane, And
they don't complete this autopsy spoiler alert. Eventually the smell
of of the corps is too much and they have
to stop. They have to throw in the towel. But
(33:30):
at this point they do learn something. They do have
a takeaway and they say, well, he wasn't making this up.
Every weird thing he ate, everything he did was a
result of this genuine, constant need to eat. He had
been born with this strange body, and as as they
say in All That's Interesting dot com, he had been
(33:51):
cursed to a life of eternal hunger. And let's bracket
this real quick for the science, right because you said
we're going to follow up on that now. As you said,
he had polyphasia of some sort. So it turns out
it's quite possible that Tara had something called prator Willie syndrome.
(34:12):
Have you heard of this? We talked about this off here. No,
I don't think so. It's it's a genetic disorder wherein
some specific genes lose their function and it results in
a couple of things. So we can build a case
for praetor Willie because people afflicted with this are constantly hungry,
they have mild intellectual impairments, and they will eat tons
(34:36):
and tons of stuff. But here's the thing. People with
creator Willie syndrome tend to grow larger, they become obese.
And that never happened to Tarar. He was he was
kind of a stick the whole time, except when he
was eating and his stomach inflated, right right, I mean,
and then it just snapped back into like a weird
gelatinous kind of hanging satchel of skin. It's a shame.
(35:01):
It's a shame. The whole thing is a shame. I mean,
you know, and I look, there is some medical research
behind this condition. Um. I didn't mean to to poop
poo it entirely. I think there's some you know, controversy
behind it. But a guy named Cindy micilroy of who's
a doctor based in Huntington, West Virginia, said that there
could be more of an underlying um condition. Uh that
(35:25):
is pretty common actually to maybe an extreme version called
hyper thyroidism, which increases metabolism and causes diarrhea, sweating, and
thin hair. I actually have hypo thyroidism, which is an
underactive thyroid. This would be an overactive thyroid that would
cause your metabolism to just balloon out of control. Um.
(35:46):
And and that that does kind of make sense. Uh
So I wonder if that's had something to do with it. Um,
Doctor uh McIlroy seems to think so. Um. And it
would cause a lot of what tar are suffered from
some of his symptoms, like diarrhea, sweating, and thin hair.
But it wouldn't eat live animals. People with hyperthyroidism toy'll
(36:06):
automatically snack. They don't have cat snacks. They do not.
They do not. And that's why I tend to think
that there's some combination of a of a mental illness
and a some kind of undiagnosable at the time physical
ailment that sort of perfectly synergized into this bizarre and
aberrant condition. You know. And people have study this guy.
(36:28):
Medical historians have contributed quite a bit of literature to him.
Jon Bondison, it's one of these medical historians works at
the University of Cardiff and Whales, and Dr Bondison says
we will likely never see anything like Tada again. Part
of it is because medicine has improved so much over
(36:50):
the centuries. Uh. And you know, the hope is that
if someone with this condition or with this set of
problems emerged, they would be diagnosed and treated appropriately, right
instead of being pressed into being some sort of poop spy.
A phrase that will haunt me now as it should,
ben should haunt us all So, so this is the
(37:15):
story of Tara. And the next time that you're hungry,
or the next time that you are you have eaten
too much maybe and you're satiated, like our our good
friend impossible Prime Minister, superproducer Casey Pegram, look around the
buffet and thank your lucky stars that you are one
(37:35):
of the people with the ability to get full. And hey,
Tarar actually lives on in our popular culture, in our zeitgeist.
He was a pretty popular subject of memes um last year.
Around August of twenty nineteen, there's a piece in New
York Magazine called the Hot New Meme is Tarra Exciting
(37:56):
a tumbler um that featured a quite a few memes
referencing um Tarre and his supposed uh consumption of a
fourteen month old French baby. So if you want to
check that out, you can go to n y mag
dot com slash Intelligencer, slash two, slash oh A, slash,
(38:17):
Dash Memes, Dash, Tumbler, Dash, squid word dot HDML. I
just wanted to read a really long, obnoxious U r L,
so I do want to point out this as well.
UH and we'll we'll need to bleep this, so use
your imagination. Someone posted on tumbler. I know tar is
the joke of the hour, but it's so incredibly messed up.
(38:39):
How even now no one has any concrete explanation for
what his condition was, and a case like that has
not been recorded since like literally what the He's like
a really x man, which is kind of true, you know.
And one of them is uh from an account by
the name of Johnny Joe's Terrible Table Uh. And it
(39:01):
the caption reads, when you're a fourteen month old French
infant in a military hospital in the late eighteenth century
and that weird hungry guy comes into your room and
it's a picture of squid word from SpongeBob sitting up
in bed with his eyes wide boom boom. Indeed. Huh yeah, absolutely,
uh so I think that's that's a good place to
leave it. In the present. Yes, in the present, and
(39:22):
right around lunchtime oddly enough. Uh, maybe I'll hit up
the buffet somewhere. Thank you as always to our super producer,
Casey Pegram, Thank you to Gabe, Thank you to Christopher,
thank you to Eaves. Huge thanks to research associate Gabe Loser.
Uh Jonathan's trickling the notorious quister Um wherever he may lurk.
(39:46):
I hope he's okay. If you want to check us
out on social media, you can do so by joining
the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group on Facebook. All you gotta
do is name me or Ben or Casey or some
combination of our names or some kind of reference. Lets
us know that you're a real person and you are
somehow aware of what this podcast is. As easy as that,
you can also find us on Instagram and Twitter and
(40:07):
all of that stuff. You want to find us individually,
you can find me exclusively on Instagram. I am at
how now, Noel Brown. I also want to point out
that you could just get a horrible pun I've heard
some horrible puns recently, like no matter how much you
push the envelope, it's still stationary. Uh so yeah, yeah,
so I would let you over for that about could
never come up with that pun, not yet, but we
(40:28):
looked at the future. Uh And of course also shout
out to Alex Williams uh our composer, who also has
a podcast of his own that history fans will enjoy
called Ephemeral Check it out while you're on the internet
as well, said we are people in our own right.
You can follow me on Twitter where I'm at then
Bowling hs W. You can follow me on Instagram where
I am at Ben Bowling. Uh and oh no, thanks
(40:52):
to you. I think I think we're both pretty lucky
that we can be satisfied with, you know, just a
good sammy. Yeah in case I love because I know
you're have you have you made it through your case
city a phase or you think you're back in man,
I just can't quit them. Yeah. Is it a sandwich? Though?
See this is god. You know it's twenty Why are
we still stuck in labels? I would see it functions
(41:14):
as a sandwich. I would tend to agree with you,
Ben let us know what you guys think. We'll see
you next time. Fix For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. What's the hungriest you've ever been,
what's the most you've eaten at one time? And are
you a fan of competitive eating? I am my name's Ben.
My name is no I'd said, probably maybe a Korean
barbecue situation or an old school buffet where you really
feel compelled to get the bang for your buck. You
(00:47):
know you you've paid an amount Korean barbecue, especially because
they just keep on bringing it, and there was all
a little bond chon which I know you like little sides,
So that's a that's a recipe for gluttony. There, your Noel,
That is who I am. True. Thank you for reminding
me and the listeners. Um, that would have been a
real bund of contention if we had moved forward without
(01:08):
saying each other's names. In addition to super Bruster, Casey Pegrum,
that's right, Casey, what's the You don't strike me as
a particularly gluttonous dude. None of the three of us
are nine probably the closest. But do you recall ever
eating so much that you you felt like terrible about it? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
(01:30):
I've I've I've been in those situations a few times.
Nothing not like a competitive eating, sort of just practicing
on my own, you know, just getting getting ready for
the big day perfect maybe a family holiday situation or
something exactly exactly. But you know, I have had that
experience of paying for an extremely expensive buffet and then
(01:51):
feeling like, uh, I gotta get my money's worth. Did
that recently in Vegas? Actually I knew it, the old
Vegas Buffet and we waited like probably listed two hours
to get up to the line, and only then did
they tell us it's like a hundred dollars ahead or whatever.
It's just like, well, we're gonna be eating a lot
of crab legs and you know, just trying to maximize
our value. It's insane. I've seen people. I've seen people
(02:12):
get a ticket for Vegas Buffet and go in at
eleven and then literally hang out on the premises long
enough to just use the bathroom and get hungry again.
That's pretty much what you gotta do. But um, we
made the best of it. Is there a prime rib station? No?
Actually I was disappointed. There was not much in the
way of steak, but there were other kind of fancy
(02:35):
seafood based things ahead. I would expect. Yeah, yes, I
was expecting like filemon or something. But um, you know,
they did have enough. I don't know if we actually
covered our our our outlet for that, but you know
it was it was a good buffet anyway. Yeah, you know,
it's it's weird because the way that Vegas buffets are priced,
(02:56):
they are making a ton of money off most people,
because most people are going to eat maybe a plate
or two and then say, well, I want to go
do the Vegas stuff, right, I don't want to see
a show, go to a casino or drive to the
Hoover Damn. I uh. I've been fascinated by competitive eating
for a long time as a participant, as a participant,
(03:17):
not so much as an observer. Love it. Kobayashi, Sonya,
the Black Widow, Thomas uh, any number of people. What
one thing that's interesting about eating what makes us full
is there's a thing called the I think it's called
the safety responsive to this. It does have something to
do with like you've got to trick your body into
not telling your brain that it's full. And that's a
(03:38):
big principle of competitive eating, right, Yeah, that's why so
much of it is time. So years ago on a
YouTube show, I was doing that. I will um, I
think you've seen it, Casey, but I'm not going to
share it with anyone. I did. I did an experiment
with the sadity complex, and essentially it means it takes
(03:58):
your stomach about seventeen to twenty three minutes to tell
your brain it's full. So you can eat like a
god or a demon or a just a swirling vortex
or black hole, uh, for for up to that amount
of time, often before your body goes whoa buster. Uh.
(04:19):
Some of this is going back out right. And that's
the thing. I mean, you know, you think about Greek
Bacchanalian feasts and all of the vomitoriums and all of
that stuff. Is that is that real? I mean, is
that actually something that you can do to just continue indulging. Uh,
people have done it, but that is not healthy for you.
You know, that's that's not There's a reason we haven't
(04:40):
evolved to eat that way because ultimately it can, uh,
it can damage your system. You know. Food can be
a tough thing. Um. It's it's strange too, because we're
the more we learn about science. The more we're learning
about things we usually just took for granted or even
in some cases treated like I know this is gonna
(05:00):
be a controversial word for some of us, treated like
a freak show territory. And that's where that's where we
get to today's story. Yeah, it's true. Today's story is
about a gentleman by the name of Casey helped us
with us earlier. I think I'm gonna do my level
best Casey on the case, Casey on the case indeed,
(05:22):
which is apparently uh Are. It's thought to be a
nickname that came from a very popular French phrase which
I adore, Bom bom, which means it's sort of like
boom goes the dynamite. I think that's literally what it means.
Uh used to describe fireworks or explosives. Um and Uh.
This gentleman who we only know by was born in
(05:44):
seventeen seventy two in Leon and Um by the time
he was seventeen, despite Um reportedly being able to consume
a quarter cow's worth of beef in a single day,
he only weighed a hundred pounds, which is so that's
always fascinating me about the world of competitive eating ben
often those uh, the folks that's excel at of the
(06:05):
best are pretty slim. Yeah, yeah, it's true. There was
a rumor for a long time that Ta Caro Kobayashi,
one of the one of the very slender competitive eating champions,
was actually somehow mutated and that his stomach could expand
beneath his rib cage so for more storage space. That
(06:25):
was never confirmed as far as I know, But if
you think about it, the bigger dudes are also their
stomach has less room to expand because there's more muscle
and stuff around, right. Yeah, and uh, but the thing
about tell is he he would beyond, well beyond just
consuming beef uh and copious amounts um. He had a
(06:47):
penchant for eating just about anything. Uh and and and
we'll get to in a second. But this is actually
a condition, a very rare condition known as polyphasia UM,
which is characterized by un insatiable hunger, uncontrollable eating um
and also, again as pointed to by his slender build,
(07:09):
a very very high metabolism UM. So he parlayed this
into a career with a traveling freak show. Yeah, he
had a rough, rough life. He was kicked out of
home as a teenager, and according to a couple of reports,
he traveled around France, became a bit of a vagabond,
and at first he was traveling with bandits and sex workers,
(07:31):
and then later he became uh sort of a warm
up act to another traveling show, where he would just
he would swallow stuff. He was like that kid you
hear about in preschool or elementary school, who's eating you know,
glue or something for a dollar or whatever whatever the
going rate for glue eating is now, I don't know.
Let us know, what was it back in your glue
(07:53):
eating days? Ben, I never eat glue. Know what about you?
What was it in your day? Well, I'm more sniffed glue, um,
but I never People will pay for that, No, no
they don't. But it was a passion, a passion. I'm kidding.
I didn't do that. But but but I only asked you
about the eating glue thing is because you came clean
on this here very show about your goldfish eating days.
So I assume maybe you had other experimental eating periods
(08:15):
polyphasia D Yeah, no, no, not that much. But I
I even in my wild days, I had nothing on,
nothing on to oh gosh, no, none, few few would
or could or absolutely should. Yeah. He uh, he would
when he was doing the traveling show. As he's evolving
towards this uh you know, this kind of freak show
(08:36):
thing mentioned earlier, He would eat corks, stones, live animals.
One time he ate a whole basket of apples, which
I think whether or not that's impressive depends on the
size of the basket, doesn't it, Because there could be uh,
there could be a tiny basket, there could be a
gigantic like bushel load basket. Did he eat the basket
as well as the apples is my question? Right? I
(08:58):
think I think in that ace he just ate the apples.
But what a big finished to eat the basket. He
also was physically, he was He had some unique characteristics, right,
Like his lips are described in Messy and Chic dot
com with this great title this article with his great
title whatever you do, don't tell the French about to Od.
(09:19):
They say that he almost he had like almost non
existent lips, and he had a really wide, kind of
frog like mouth. This I had a hard time believing
his mouth could hold twelve eggs at once. Are they
chicken eggs? Again? It's like the basket. Is it a
quail egg? I can believe that. Yeah, I mean I
can only assume that they mean quail eggs. But he
(09:43):
also had another particularly stomach turning feature. Um that's a pun.
Also preparing listeners is pretty gross. His you use the
word deflated, ben, His deflated stomach sack um hung loose
in such a fast and that he could actually wrap
it around his body like a belt. Yeah. Picture that
(10:04):
for a minute, so you know how we're talking about
this South Air Probably the closest analog I could draw
as if someone has um been exercising, or for one
reason or another, they lose a lot they're they're a
very big person. They lose a lot of weight very quickly.
Your skin is just another organ, right, and so it
can still hang down or deflate because there's it's there's
(10:28):
less stuff under it than there used to be. And
for from what what we can tell, it seems like
he had been routinely eating uh so much stuff to
such an extreme that his stomach, the flesh over his
stomach had kind of naturally over time grown or expanded,
so that like like you said, nol, when he's not eating,
(10:51):
it's it's kind of like an empty tack, you know, yep. Yeah,
and then an extreme polyophasia is super super were almost
to the point where is it Isn't it kind of
almost like looked on with a little bit of suspicion,
like is it really is a really a real thing?
For some time it had been considered anecdotal. But there's
(11:13):
there's some science we can get into, uh maybe towards
the end, because science does have an answer. Uh, And
we have to tell you the story about today because
it's a story spoiler alert that you may be able
to see in the modern world as insane as it sounds. Sure, um,
so we'll definitely get to that that science. But it
(11:35):
is characterized the concept of it as someone um just
not being able to control their appetite at all. And
the extra kind of disturbing feature is that it typically
involves eating non food items. Yeah, it's it's really similar,
but it's not like uh, pica or pika. It's called
you know, when people eat clay, which is a thing
(11:56):
that happened here in the American South. Cause it's unrelenting,
it's an insatiable hunger. It's it's kind of like a
real life version of the myth of Tantalus. You know
Tantalus who was up to his chin in uh delicious liquids,
and then he's got grapes so close to his face,
and every time he tries to grab a grape or
(12:17):
a fruit or whatever, and every time he tries to
take a sip, it vanishes. It's it feels like it
goes beyond a medical condition to some sort of biblical curse. Really,
you'll eat, never be full, And that's exactly the case.
And in a big bone of contention within his household
when he was a kid, his parents had become so
frustrated with their inability to satiate him, and it was
(12:40):
honestly a financial burden. He would cry and cry and
cry even when he had just completed a massive meal.
They finally kicked him out of his house, and that
is when he kind of began that life is sort
of a nomad traveler um and leagued up with everyone
from sex workers to the fee that you mentioned, and
(13:01):
then eventually found his way into sort of the carnival
lifestyle um where he was he was taken in and
welcomed um. He became a street performer in Paris on
the pomp Neuf, and that was an area that was
considered so disreputable in CD that even known U philanderer
(13:23):
Benjamin Franklin founded too sketchy to to walk across it
as a bridge in Paris. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this
is not a super correct term nowadays. But what he
was doing, his act was pretty much it was a
predecessor to the famous, you know, circus geek acts of
(13:44):
yesteryear when someone would eat a live chicken. But he
didn't just eat live chickens. And we have firsthand accounts
of Tony's act. Here's a quote, and I warn you
this is not not super appetite scene. He sees the
live cat with his teeth event traded, that's the word, disemboweled,
(14:07):
inventraated it, sucked its blood and ate it, leaving the
bear skeleton. Only. He also ate dogs in the same manner.
On one occasion, it was said that he swallowed a
living deal without chewing it. That's disgusting. Yeah, is that
part of the show or that stuff he just did
in his own private alone times. This was part of
the show. That's that's why whenever you see a street
(14:28):
show and someone says, who has a pet in the audience,
just make for the hill desertially, definitely don't don't offer
up your your little your sheetzu. Um. That is really
disturbing and well absolutely barbaric. And I can't believe people
were into this. Uh. I would think, you know, that
would have caused people to just you know, turn and disgust.
But I guess people's appetites were pretty disgusting back in
(14:51):
those days, and they had a different, less sanitized idea
of entertainment. If you were the kind of person who
would watch this guy eat random stuff, if that was
the way you wanted to spend your afternoon, you would
have to be prepared for the smell, the aroma, the stench,
(15:14):
because although Torreto was a you know, average sized dude
and and pretty much on the skinny side, he had
a big smell. He had big smell energy. We found
something in the London Medical and Physical Journal in eighteen
nineteen describing his smell nel. Since I did the eating
(15:35):
the cat thing, do you want to handle the stench part? Yeah, okay,
I will. I will just preface by saying that this
stench followed him around his whole life. It was something
that was reported as early as when he was seventeen,
and would sneak into town to eat the cows feed.
Uh and he you know again, had had that slender build,
but always was followed around by this putrid stench. So
(15:57):
here is that quote from the London men Nicle and
Physical Journal from eighteen nineteen quote, try my best to
get through this Tar was constantly covered in sweat, and
from his body a vapor arose sensible to the site
and more so the smells so wait like stink lines
(16:21):
wow okay, and more so to the smell. He had
a wispy blonde hair and a large mouth surrounded by
slender lips and discolored teeth. He frequently burped and farted
and had constant particularly odorous Ben, why would you do
this to me? His bowel movements. I had a cat.
(16:44):
I can't I can't tell which one's worse. I think
you're right, Ben, I think maybe the cat was worse.
But sound effects of burps and farts just real quick,
or maybe it's one of those like the ship sounds
are like from rend and stimpy. When one of those
smelly looking close ups local high pressure farted exactly exactly
uh odorous bowel movements. That was my favorite member of
(17:14):
the bangor Um, which one would expect from someone who's
diet consisted of massive amounts of both food and non
food items. All right, First of all, I want to
know what one would expect from from the smell of
someone who ate non food items. Depends on the food items.
If they're just swallowing rocks, they'll probably pebbles, will probably
(17:37):
just pass through and maybe not make a big smell.
But if it's organic non food items, I would imagine
at some point it also interacts with your your microbio,
your your gut flora, so you can get some pretty
uh disgusting stuff. Today, I would have been set to
be a street for performer, you know. And and keep
(17:59):
in mind, uh, there is a history in France of
very successful performers doing things that might be disgusting to us,
like professional farters flash list, what was that guy's name?
So this is like, this is not an unusual thing
in the history of performance in France. And could today
(18:23):
I have made a living doing this, Yeah, probably, but
something intervened as as you said, he was born in
what seventeen seventy two in seventeen eighty nine, France was
racked by the French Revolution, and so today I to
join the French military. He didn't fight, He helped people
out with day to day task and then when he
(18:45):
would help them, they would give him their rations and
he would eat them. And eventually he ended up in
the military hospital because no matter what he ate, he
was still hungry, and the physicians wanted to see how
far they could go, so they quadrupled as rations. He
ate those, he was still hungry. He also ate gauze
that was intended, you know, to patch up soldiers, and
(19:08):
he ate any live animals he could find. And then
one time true story, they found him in a gutter
during his time at the hospital, shoving fistfuls of literal
garbage into his mouth. I want to also note I
don't think we hit this yet. Um, we have multiple
accounts of people saying, yeah, other than eating in the
(19:28):
disgusting smell, he was a normal dude. But he was
also super apathetic, like he didn't seem very present. A
lot of times he was just sort of like, whatever,
I'll eat it, and uh, And I think that I'm
building a case towards what I think may have been
a lower mental function, like I think maybe he wasn't,
(19:49):
uh wasn't a full set of craons. Oh, I don't
think so either. I mean definitely seemed to go hand
in hand. And it's also part of the reason why
I questioned the medical racity of this quote unquote condition. Um,
it seems like it was largely a mental condition, and
not that that makes anything any less real. I mean,
psychological conditions are are absolutely all consuming for people, and
(20:10):
they can really cause huge problems in people's quality of
life and the way they interact with others. But I
don't know that there's necessarily a physical or physiological thing
that caused him to, uh, to feel this way, other
than maybe something that was going on psychologically. Reminds me
of a condition that's depicted in the show Better called
Saul or Sault. Goodman's brother has this allergy to electricity. Um,
(20:33):
but that's largely considered by the medical community to not
be a real thing. Yeah, the E M F sensitivity,
it's right. Yeah, So you're right. In the military, he
was super problematic, but he also there were some creative
uses for him, right, There were attempts, There were attempts
to make him useful. So the weird thing is he
(20:54):
also wasn't gaining weight, by the way, still weight. I
think you mentioned earlier a hundred pounds when seventeen he
still had that ballpark weight, and he looked he was
exhibiting signs of under nourishment as a matter of fact.
So they thought, all right, we're gonna we're gonna try
to make this guy useful because he has something. It's
(21:15):
not perfect, but he has uh, he's got potential, he's
got an unusual set of skills. Right, that's right, you know,
I mean, might as well figure out how to make
some use out of the guy you gotta hang around with,
smelly dude. Let's figure out how to take his uh,
his gift, let's say, and then put it to good
militaristic use. Yep. And this is when I'm gonna muddle
through this casey I hope you're still friends at the end.
(21:37):
This is when General Alexandre du said, you know what,
no man left behind. We can give this kid something
to do. France is now at war with Prussia and
tas weird digestive condition makes him the perfect spy. So
he says, sorry, I'm putting some documents inside this would
(22:00):
box that I you're hungry, right, go ahead and eat this,
and then we'll just wait for it to pass through
your body, and then we'll have you know, whichever soldiers
in the most trouble that day go through his stool
and then fish the box out to see if you
can still read the message. This experiment worked, and so
to has given his first mission as a spy. Yes, indeed,
(22:24):
it was a noble experiment. I suppose you could say, um,
one that wouldn't ultimately be repeated. But he was disguised
as a Prussian peasant UM and asked to sneak by
enemy lines to deliver a top secret message to a
captured colonel, a French colonel. Um. The message was to
(22:46):
be enclosed in a box that was then um swallowed
whole by it till Um. But unfortunately he didn't really
make it to his destination UM, because of of the
aforementioned putrid smell did not lend itself to covert ops,
did it, Ben, Yeah, that's correct. It's it's a good point.
(23:10):
If you are a spy, you don't want to have
a unique sort of old factory tone. Let's call it
I'm searching for diplomatic ways to use the word stink. Yeah,
So they find him. He is strip searched, they whip him,
they torture him for most of a day, and then
eventually he says, okay, I'm here take a secret message,
(23:33):
you know, I'm sneaking into my in my gut, and
then people are going to find it in my poop.
It's about the war. So the Prussians literally chain him
to a toilet and they just wait, God for hours
and hours, and he still stinks, by the way, and
terras of course, starving. He has to wait until he
(23:54):
has a bowel movement. Eventually he does void uh the
wooden case and he tries, this is okay, this is
very gross is according to the London Journal. After he
couldn't hold it anymore and he passed the case, he
swallowed it again to try to keep the enemy from
getting it. They finally do get the box out of him,
(24:17):
and all they find inside is evidence that this is
a test run. The note in the little box just says, hey,
let us know if this guy today had delivered the box.
And it turns out the general still, you know, didn't
really trust the guy or this process enough he needed
some confirmed success in the field. Yeah, well, okay, good
(24:39):
on him then, because this whole thing sounded like a
real recipe for disaster if you asked me, and then
then sure enough it was. Can you imagine though, like
swallowing it back down and the whole the whole scenario.
It's just like it's like reservoir dogs gone awry or something,
you know, like chained to the toilet it. I mean,
(25:01):
I'm surprised no one's made some kind of sick version
of this movie, like a human centipede style or something.
You know. This is I should this should this should exist.
I don't know if I want to see it, but
I would support its existence as a piece of schlock cinema.
What do you think, Casey? Yeah, this is this is
right for some some schlocky goodness. Did you say, ripe? Yeah? Yeah,
(25:23):
that's the thing. The smell is a main character in
this story. Maybe that's what's holding people back. It's just
the film technology. It could be a spiritual predecessor to
the big rock movie that did so this year. Her
smell it can be called his smell. Yeah, it's just
a thought. Maybe people feel like they got tricked though.
Oh man, I was looking up so many different synonyms
(25:45):
for smell, stink, stinch, that kind of stuff, just to
get through this. Anyhow, I'm a big fan of mi
asthma myself, which I guess is a little bit refers
to more of like a big picture smell something they laugh,
you know, um proliferates a bit farther. But I could
I could you categorize what he had as a miasmas
that you can actually see the thing? Yeah, it also
(26:05):
had a miasma was for a time a medical explanation
for the spread of disease, which is very believable. You
talked about that in the episode about the Great Stink
of London. Uh, And okay, so stinking. You know, of
course there's fetted. Somebody smells fetted, right. Uh. There's also,
(26:26):
of course spoiled. They're spoiling. Uh. And I was trying
to find a particular word for that stench, that sulfurus
stench of rotten eggs. You guys know what I'm talking
to us. Yeah, I didn't find one. Oh and there's
also funk reek, fustiness, meluderous, nous o, differousness, which is
(26:49):
kind of fun and rancidity. Yeah, it's rough, but anyhow,
these are all just different words to describe what was happening.
The Prussian general, by the way, is severely po to that,
and he says, hang the guy, hang him, hang him. Immediately,
I can't believe I let that guy go. What was
I think? In a poop spy. But once he had
calmed down, he said, you know, I feel bad because
(27:12):
I see this guy so obviously again starving his whole life,
and he is openly sobbing. He's blubbering at the gallows,
and so he takes pity on to Rye and he says, Okay,
I mean, you guys just give him a very very
thorough spanking essentially and go back to the French lines.
So he returned, and he was just doing the thing
(27:34):
he did earlier. He's just like, you know, running coffee
for people. Yeah. The Prussians essentially just dumped him back
near that military hospital behind French lines. Um, and he
you know, made his case to his superiors, which I
don't think would have been too difficult to make that
he was not cut out for the spies life and
(27:55):
that he should, you know, not be asked to do
any more secret missions. He just wanted to be a
regular are smelly foot soldier right exactly. And he had
kind of a patron and a guy named Baron Percy
at the hospital, and Percy tried to satiated. He gave
him different treatments that were meant to swash his appetite,
(28:18):
and none of them were successful. I think. Uh, they
tried tobacco pills, straight up, vinegar, wine vinegar, and laudanum.
And the thing about the laudanum is I believe opiates
do actually cause constipation. So maybe that's where he was
going maybe, or you know, I can't imagine that it
(28:38):
would have been particularly comfortable to have all this weird
crap flitting around in your guts and all of the
long term damage which we will find out, you know,
was the case that it would have done to his insides. Um.
I imagine that the must have been considerable pain a
lot of the time, but you don't really see that
in the reports. But maybe that was where he was
coming from as well, with giving him a little something
(28:59):
to ease it. Yeah, and this takes a morbid turn.
We were having fun in a gross way in the
beginning of the episode, but not only did these treatments
not work, as a condition appeared to accelerate. There was
no food that was enough. He had gone past eating trash.
During one episode, he was actually caught drinking blood that
(29:25):
had been drawn from other patients in the hospital and
even nashing on some bodies in the morgue. I mean, yeah,
said at this point, it's just becoming sad and really
really really disturbing. He's almost kind of like taking on
this kind of gullum like quality where he is just
you know, becoming more and more inhuman. And that is
when the disappearance of a fourteen month old baby began
(29:48):
to generate rumors that Tarar had had somehow gotten a
hold of the baby and and actually eaten it. I mean,
you can't make this stuff up, man. It's uh, that
was at the that was was at the very hospital
that he was admitted to. That's right. And at this
point it's finally too much for Baron Percy. TDAD has
(30:09):
in his mind crossed a line. Even if the historically
we can't confirm this story of the fourteen month old
baby disappearing, everybody believed it in the hospital, right, and
you can see why it's not like they just came
up with a cockamami conspiracy theory. So Baron Percy kicks
(30:35):
Tarad out the same way that his parents kicked him
out was when he was a teenager, and he has
to fend for himself from then on. He falls off
the radar, is off the grid for like four years,
and then one day Baron Percy hears from him again.
He Trado has turned up in a hospital in Versailles. Yeah,
and he was at this hospital because he was in
(30:56):
fact dying. Um. This is something that I would have
thought would have happened much sooner, just considering, you know,
all of the crazy stuff he put in his body,
and that he put his his his digestive track through.
I can't imagine that he was healthy, um at all.
And Baron Percy, who was Baron Percy to him in
the first place, Ben skin of his his patriot, his
(31:19):
benefactor at the hospital, I see, so he he was
with him at this point. Um. And he died ultimately,
uh torout did of tuberculosis in at the young age
of twenty six. Um. And this is probably one of
the most uh nauseating parts of the story. But they
(31:42):
you know, he was absolutely a a fascination and something
that medical science could potentially learn something from. So and
of course just just an autopsy is something that happens anyway.
But he was uh cut open, and there are some
descriptions of his autopsy that are really really graphic and
(32:03):
just you know, they really paint a picture of what
was going on inside this man's body. So I guess
this one falls to me. Split it's that's the set up.
Let's see how long it goes. All right, there's two,
so yeah, I'll do the second one. Let's go back. Okay,
that's that's equit. And this is from all That's Interesting
dot com these accounts, but this is official, very real
(32:26):
accounts of what this autopsy was like. The entrails were putrified,
confounded together, and immersed in pus. The liver was excessively large,
void of consistence, and in a putrescent state. The gall
bladder was of considerable magnitude. The stomach in a lack state,
(32:46):
and having ulcerated patches dispersed about it covered almost the
whole of the addominal region um. His stomach, they found,
was so massive that it very nearly filled his entire
ab nominal cavity. His gullet, likewise, was unusually wide, and
his jaw could stretch so wide open that, as the
(33:08):
reports put it, a cylinder of a foot and circumference
could be introduced without touching his palette. That's insane, And
they don't complete this autopsy spoiler alert. Eventually the smell
of of the corps is too much and they have
to stop. They have to throw in the towel. But
(33:30):
at this point they do learn something. They do have
a takeaway and they say, well, he wasn't making this up.
Every weird thing he ate, everything he did was a
result of this genuine, constant need to eat. He had
been born with this strange body, and as as they
say in All That's Interesting dot com, he had been
(33:51):
cursed to a life of eternal hunger. And let's bracket
this real quick for the science, right because you said
we're going to follow up on that now. As you said,
he had polyphasia of some sort. So it turns out
it's quite possible that Tara had something called prator Willie syndrome.
(34:12):
Have you heard of this? We talked about this off here. No,
I don't think so. It's it's a genetic disorder wherein
some specific genes lose their function and it results in
a couple of things. So we can build a case
for praetor Willie because people afflicted with this are constantly hungry,
they have mild intellectual impairments, and they will eat tons
(34:36):
and tons of stuff. But here's the thing. People with
creator Willie syndrome tend to grow larger, they become obese.
And that never happened to Tarar. He was he was
kind of a stick the whole time, except when he
was eating and his stomach inflated, right right, I mean,
and then it just snapped back into like a weird
gelatinous kind of hanging satchel of skin. It's a shame.
(35:01):
It's a shame. The whole thing is a shame. I mean,
you know, and I look, there is some medical research
behind this condition. Um. I didn't mean to to poop
poo it entirely. I think there's some you know, controversy
behind it. But a guy named Cindy micilroy of who's
a doctor based in Huntington, West Virginia, said that there
could be more of an underlying um condition. Uh that
(35:25):
is pretty common actually to maybe an extreme version called
hyper thyroidism, which increases metabolism and causes diarrhea, sweating, and
thin hair. I actually have hypo thyroidism, which is an
underactive thyroid. This would be an overactive thyroid that would
cause your metabolism to just balloon out of control. Um.
(35:46):
And and that that does kind of make sense. Uh
So I wonder if that's had something to do with it. Um,
Doctor uh McIlroy seems to think so. Um. And it
would cause a lot of what tar are suffered from
some of his symptoms, like diarrhea, sweating, and thin hair.
But it wouldn't eat live animals. People with hyperthyroidism toy'll
(36:06):
automatically snack. They don't have cat snacks. They do not.
They do not. And that's why I tend to think
that there's some combination of a of a mental illness
and a some kind of undiagnosable at the time physical
ailment that sort of perfectly synergized into this bizarre and
aberrant condition. You know. And people have study this guy.
(36:28):
Medical historians have contributed quite a bit of literature to him.
Jon Bondison, it's one of these medical historians works at
the University of Cardiff and Whales, and Dr Bondison says
we will likely never see anything like Tada again. Part
of it is because medicine has improved so much over
(36:50):
the centuries. Uh. And you know, the hope is that
if someone with this condition or with this set of
problems emerged, they would be diagnosed and treated appropriately, right
instead of being pressed into being some sort of poop spy.
A phrase that will haunt me now as it should,
ben should haunt us all So, so this is the
(37:15):
story of Tara. And the next time that you're hungry,
or the next time that you are you have eaten
too much maybe and you're satiated, like our our good
friend impossible Prime Minister, superproducer Casey Pegram, look around the
buffet and thank your lucky stars that you are one
(37:35):
of the people with the ability to get full. And hey,
Tarar actually lives on in our popular culture, in our zeitgeist.
He was a pretty popular subject of memes um last year.
Around August of twenty nineteen, there's a piece in New
York Magazine called the Hot New Meme is Tarra Exciting
(37:56):
a tumbler um that featured a quite a few memes
referencing um Tarre and his supposed uh consumption of a
fourteen month old French baby. So if you want to
check that out, you can go to n y mag
dot com slash Intelligencer, slash two, slash oh A, slash,
(38:17):
Dash Memes, Dash, Tumbler, Dash, squid word dot HDML. I
just wanted to read a really long, obnoxious U r L,
so I do want to point out this as well.
UH and we'll we'll need to bleep this, so use
your imagination. Someone posted on tumbler. I know tar is
the joke of the hour, but it's so incredibly messed up.
(38:39):
How even now no one has any concrete explanation for
what his condition was, and a case like that has
not been recorded since like literally what the He's like
a really x man, which is kind of true, you know.
And one of them is uh from an account by
the name of Johnny Joe's Terrible Table Uh. And it
(39:01):
the caption reads, when you're a fourteen month old French
infant in a military hospital in the late eighteenth century
and that weird hungry guy comes into your room and
it's a picture of squid word from SpongeBob sitting up
in bed with his eyes wide boom boom. Indeed. Huh yeah, absolutely,
uh so I think that's that's a good place to
leave it. In the present. Yes, in the present, and
(39:22):
right around lunchtime oddly enough. Uh, maybe I'll hit up
the buffet somewhere. Thank you as always to our super producer,
Casey Pegram, Thank you to Gabe, Thank you to Christopher,
thank you to Eaves. Huge thanks to research associate Gabe Loser.
Uh Jonathan's trickling the notorious quister Um wherever he may lurk.
(39:46):
I hope he's okay. If you want to check us
out on social media, you can do so by joining
the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group on Facebook. All you gotta
do is name me or Ben or Casey or some
combination of our names or some kind of reference. Lets
us know that you're a real person and you are
somehow aware of what this podcast is. As easy as that,
you can also find us on Instagram and Twitter and
(40:07):
all of that stuff. You want to find us individually,
you can find me exclusively on Instagram. I am at
how now, Noel Brown. I also want to point out
that you could just get a horrible pun I've heard
some horrible puns recently, like no matter how much you
push the envelope, it's still stationary. Uh so yeah, yeah,
so I would let you over for that about could
never come up with that pun, not yet, but we
(40:28):
looked at the future. Uh And of course also shout
out to Alex Williams uh our composer, who also has
a podcast of his own that history fans will enjoy
called Ephemeral Check it out while you're on the internet
as well, said we are people in our own right.
You can follow me on Twitter where I'm at then
Bowling hs W. You can follow me on Instagram where
I am at Ben Bowling. Uh and oh no, thanks
(40:52):
to you. I think I think we're both pretty lucky
that we can be satisfied with, you know, just a
good sammy. Yeah in case I love because I know
you're have you have you made it through your case
city a phase or you think you're back in man,
I just can't quit them. Yeah. Is it a sandwich? Though?
See this is god. You know it's twenty Why are
we still stuck in labels? I would see it functions
(41:14):
as a sandwich. I would tend to agree with you,
Ben let us know what you guys think. We'll see
you next time. Fix For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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