0:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, I'm not even sure what to do with this one. 0:07 [SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about Tarrari, the 18th century French showman, and show eater, and one of the least lovely and most helpless people in all of human history. 0:20 [SPEAKER_00]: He was born in 1772 and died in 1798. 0:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Terrarry died yarn because his addictions consumed him. 0:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And just about everything else he could get his hands on. 0:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And the more you read about him, the less he sounds like a real person. 0:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The more he sounds like a mythical beast from a medieval book of morals. 0:45 [SPEAKER_00]: He sounds almost like a demon, from the ludenous circle of hell, and Dante's inferno. 0:52 [SPEAKER_00]: More than he does a human being. 0:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The terms polyphagia and hyperphagia were used by doctors to describe terraris disorder and they basically just mean and have normally strong appetite. 1:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And like most attempts to describe terraris, these medical terms were prone to understatement. 1:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Even saying he's a misfit, is like seeing the burning of the library of Constantinople was a minor lapse in judgment. 1:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Terrari ate a baby, not because he had a special preference for this, or because he liked the taste, but because he ate everything, like everything. 1:39 [SPEAKER_00]: If he could fit it in his mouth or break it into pieces, small enough to fit into his mouth, he ate it. 1:47 [SPEAKER_00]: In his mouth could fit an enormous amount. 1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: His jaws were wide set and almost unhinged, so they stretched, like an anacondos. 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: They could open a 4-inch gap to allow him to swallow large objects, whole, and yet he was skinny to the end of his life. 2:11 [SPEAKER_00]: He could hold 12 eggs in his mouth at once, or 12 apples. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: In the skin of his cheeks was so used to these giant mouthfuls that it sagged and wrinkled when his mouth was empty. 2:28 [SPEAKER_00]: but it rarely wrinkled for long, because Tarrari almost never stopped eating. 2:33 [SPEAKER_00]: He stopped to sleep, we think, but the rest of his waking life would spend eating and finding the next thing to eat. 2:46 [SPEAKER_00]: In order to eat for free, and to find the next meal, he put on shows as a street performer. 2:53 [SPEAKER_00]: He would dare people to fill him up. 2:55 [SPEAKER_00]: And anything they offered, he ate. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: They brought out whole chickens and legs of layer. 3:03 [SPEAKER_00]: They brought baskets of quarks, silverware, rocks, and Ferrari ate it all. 3:11 [SPEAKER_00]: They also brought him life snakes and lizards, and litter of kittens and puppies, and he ate those two, like a wild animal, while they were alive, and he later vomited their fur just like a hawk bite. 3:29 [SPEAKER_00]: By the way, the name Terauri was a stage name, probably rooted in the common French phrase, Bomb Bomb Terauri, which was set at that time to celebrate loud noises or explosions. 3:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Jan Bondison, a Swedish rheumatologist who has studied this case, suggests that Terauri's name is derived from this tribute to loud explosions. 3:55 [SPEAKER_00]: and reference to his legendary flat roots, seriously, as far as we're so memorable that he was named after them. 4:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Yikes. 4:05 [SPEAKER_00]: As Taurari's famed group, he joined a troop of traveling prostitutes inside show acts, before later enlisting in the French army, in which the French general Alexander de Bohrne under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte tried to use him as a spy. 4:25 [SPEAKER_00]: They test to terrorize abilities by having him swallow a wooden box, containing pieces of paper. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: With the idea of using him as a kind of human carrier pigeon, who might carry a box of valuable documents through the enemy territory, deep in the folds of his mysterious insights. 4:47 [SPEAKER_00]: When Tarari passed the test, literally, I mean by passing it right through his digestive track, he was rewarded with a will-barrel fall of raw bulls, liver, and lungs, which he promptly devoured by the fistful. 5:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Satisfied with his horrific display, the general sent Tarari into action, and which he was almost immediately captured, in tortured by his German captors. 5:15 [SPEAKER_00]: But this was really the general's fault. 5:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Tarari's appearance made him stand out even in the largest of crowds. 5:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't speak a word of German. 5:25 [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to imagine our worst combination for a spy. 5:29 [SPEAKER_00]: By the time his captors discharged him after a few mock executions, Tarari was ruined from military service. 5:39 [SPEAKER_00]: returning to France, he landed in a military hospital where he begged for a cure for his appetite. 5:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing worked. 5:48 [SPEAKER_00]: He continued to eat everything inside, and in some ways, the hospital was the wrong place for him to be. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He hoarded hospital food and ate doctor's sows and medications. 6:03 [SPEAKER_00]: He drank from blood bags, snuck into the mortgage night, to eat from unclean to bodies, and generally freaked out the entire hospital staff with his lurking, increasingly vampiric presence. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: There were fierce debates among hospital staff as to whether Terraris should be sent to a mental asylum for the safety of their patients. 6:28 [SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately they decided to keep him so they might continue their tests and medical experiments on this singular biological specimen. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: This was a decision they would soon regret. 6:43 [SPEAKER_00]: It was only a short time later that a 14-month-old baby from a nearby room went missing. 6:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The nurses looked everywhere and unable to explain this disappearance in any rational way. 6:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Their thoughts eventually turned to the resident polyfagious. 7:03 [SPEAKER_00]: And something about the look in Taurari's eyes gave him away. 7:08 [SPEAKER_00]: He was immediately thrown out of the hospital, and then, himself, disappeared for four years. 7:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Before resurfacing at a different hospital, in Versailles. 7:20 [SPEAKER_00]: In the very least, we can all hope that in his cannibalism, he was during that time, not a repeat offender. 7:29 [SPEAKER_00]: We can say that it would have been difficult for him to sneak up on people due to his overwhelming physical stench, which was documented in at least one medical journal. 7:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Terraray says Professor Percy, was constantly covered with sweat. 7:47 [SPEAKER_00]: from his body, always burning hot, a vapor arose, sensible to the sight, and still more so to the smell. 7:56 [SPEAKER_00]: He often stank to such a degree that he could not be endured with the distance of 20 pieces. 8:04 [SPEAKER_00]: the journal continued. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The patient was subject to flux from the bowels, and his objections were fetied beyond all comprehension, and when he had not eaten copiously, within his short time, the skin of his belly would wrap almost around his body, and the hospital in Versailles to Rari developed and about the only part 8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: that made any sense, a violent case of bleeding diarrhea from which he never recovered. 8:39 [SPEAKER_00]: He was convinced at the time that the reason for his illness was a golden fork that he had stolen, which had lodged somewhere in his digestive tract. 8:49 [SPEAKER_00]: The more likely culprit was tuberculosis. 8:55 [SPEAKER_00]: In any event, he died in a great deal of pain, and all attempts to study his unusual body were compromised by the rapid pace as which his body decayed, following his death. 9:09 [SPEAKER_00]: His insides were so damaged by his habits that they were more or less one giant festering sore. 9:17 [SPEAKER_00]: In the words of a reporting doctor, 9:19 [SPEAKER_00]: His body, as soon as he was dead, became a prey to a horrible corruption. 9:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The entrells were petrified, confounded together, in immersed and pus. 9:32 [SPEAKER_00]: The liver was exceedingly large, void of consistence, in an iputrescent state, the gallbladder was of considerable magnitude, the stomach, any locked state, and having all serrated patches dispersed about it. 9:49 [SPEAKER_00]: covered almost the hole of the abdominal region. 9:53 [SPEAKER_00]: The stench of the body was so insupportable that imtizer chief sergeant at the hospital could not carry his investigation to any further extent. 10:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, as gross and disturbing as all of this sounds, keep in mind that we are talking about a medical disorder. 10:13 [SPEAKER_00]: This term, Polyphagia, doesn't refer to someone who is always eating everything. 10:20 [SPEAKER_00]: It refers to a clinical disease. 10:24 [SPEAKER_00]: This diagnosis suggests an addiction with physical and spiritual. 10:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Something interwarri-soul analogous to his wrinkled empty cheeks and his cavernous empty throat. 10:39 [SPEAKER_00]: No matter how much he ate, he could never be filled, and when he begged for help, no one could help him. 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: His appetite reduced him to a kind of animal that would never be as at home in the company of other humans, as he was in the gutter, fighting animals for scraps. 11:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Many others have been diagnosed with the same disorder, and the symptoms are fairly consistent. 11:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Others, like Charles Dormory, an Antoine Linguelette, have been skinny men who disliked cooked meat, as did Tarare. 11:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Much like Golum from the Lord of the Rings epic, many true polyfeges prefer their meat raw and often wriggling. 11:27 [SPEAKER_00]: even live animals is a reoccurring thing, and Rod and Meat is usually preferred to meet prepared in a more traditional manner. 11:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Bondenson has suggested a couple of brain abnormalities that may be behind this disorder. 11:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Though no definite research has been done, people like Terraria appear to suffer from a brain abnormality that prevents them from knowing when they are full. 11:56 [SPEAKER_00]: the part of the brain that regulates our appetites and tells us when enough is enough. 12:02 [SPEAKER_00]: It's damaged or simply undeveloped. 12:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Baudensen says, it is known that Apatai is primarily regulated by two hypotherlamic centers in the brain. 12:14 [SPEAKER_00]: He's sat at his center in the vitramedial nucleus, in the feeding center, in the lateral part of the hypotherlamus. 12:23 [SPEAKER_00]: If this part of the brain shuts down, Apatai becomes a dominant force in the human brain, with nothing to slow it down. 12:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, injuries to the amygdalaid nuclei, a small oval structure near the base of the brain, have been shown to cause human animals to develop a preference for tainted and rotten food, which might explain the polyfegious preference for spoiled meat. 12:53 [SPEAKER_00]: but who really knows. 12:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Science has been so far incapable of providing concrete explanations for this fortunately rare disorder. 13:05 [SPEAKER_00]: So often with history, what we learn is loss about big dramatic takeaways. 13:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And more about sympathy, empathy, and the incomprehensible depths of the human person. 13:17 [SPEAKER_00]: We learn how hard life can be, and how awful, and how the worst people in the world tend to also be victims in their own way. 13:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The story of Tarari is a prime example of this. 13:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully through stories like Tarari's, we learn to forgive people we don't understand, even as we learn to defend ourselves against them, and that alone makes remembering them worthwhile. 13:45 [SPEAKER_00]: but it's also a relief to return to more uplifting stories as we well in the next episode. 13:53 [SPEAKER_00]: When we look at the life in tiny country, of George Deburn, who declared his independence from his native Nazi Germany, and called himself a citizen of the world. 14:07 [SPEAKER_00]: He went so far as to create his own flag, and passport and lived on Te Repanga, his little boat that became for decades, a floating nation of one.
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