These are appellations given to certain individuals of a depraved
appetite, that enables them to devour raw meat, and various other
substances which most unquestionably would destroy any person not gifted
or cursed with such an omnivorous digestion.
Various are the ancient stories related of such voracious wretches. Ovid
describes one Erisichthon, who, as a punishment for cutting down the
groves of Ceres, (very possibly to obtain fuel to cook his food,) was
sentenced to perpetual hunger, and terminated his gluttonous career by
eating up his own limbs. Theagenes thought nothing of an ox for his
dinner; and the famed Crotonian athlete, Milo, knocked down bullocks with
his fist for his daily meals, which usually consisted of twenty _minae_ of
meat and the same ration of bread. Vopiscus relates that a man was brought
before the Emperor Maximilian, who devoured a whole calf, and was
proceeding to eat up a sheep, had he not been prevented. To this day, in
India, some voracious mountebanks devour a live sheep as an exhibition.
Dr. Boehmen of Wittenberg witnessed the performance of one of these
polyphagous individuals, who commenced his repast by eating a raw sheep, a
sucking-pig, and, by way of dessert, swallowed sixty pounds of prunes,
stones and all. On another festive occasion, he ate two bushels of
cherries, with several earthen vases, and chips of a furnace. This meal
was followed up by sundry pieces of glass and pebbles, a shepherd's
bagpipe, rats, various birds with their feathers, and an incredible number
of caterpillars. To conclude his dinner, he swallowed a pewter inkstand,
with its pens, a pen-knife, and a sandbox. During this deglutition he
seemed to relish his food, but was generally under the influence of
potations of brandy. His form was athletic, and he could carry four heavy
men on his shoulders for a league. He lived to the age of seventy-nine,
but died in a most emaciated state, and, as might be imagined, toothless.
Helwig knew an old man who was in the habit of eating eighty pounds of
different articles of food daily. Real Colomb mentions an omnivorous
glutton, who, in the absence of any salutary aliment, satisfied his
cravings with any other substance, and was once known, when hungry, to eat
the contents of a sack of charcoal, and then to swallow the bag to
facilitate its digestion. One of the attendants on the menagerie of the
Botanical Gardens in Paris, who bore the euphonious name of _Bijou_, used
to devour all the offals of the theatre of Comparative Anatomy, and ate a
dead lion in one day. He was active, and lived to the age of sixty. A
cannibal once desolated the Vivarais, by dragging human victims to his
den, where he devoured them. On the opening of the corpse of a convict in
the galleys of Brest, there were found in his stomach about six hundred
pieces of wood, pewter, and iron.
All these accounts might appear most exaggerated, perhaps fabulous, had
not many physicians in Paris known the celebrated Tarrare. The history of
this monster is as curious as his habits were disgusting. He commenced his
career in life in the capacity of clown to an itinerant quack, and used to
attract the notice of the populace by his singular powers of deglutition,
swallowing with the utmost ease corks, pebbles, and basketsful of apples.
However, these experiments were frequently followed by severe pain and
accidents, which once obliged him to seek assistance in the Hotel Dieu of
Paris. His sufferings did not deter him from similar experiments; and he
once tried to exhibit his wonderful faculties by swallowing the watch,
chain and seals, of Mr. Giraud, then house-surgeon of the establishment.
In this repast he was foiled, having been told that he would be ripped up
to recover the property. In the revolutionary war, Tarrare joined the
army, but was soon exhausted on the spare diet to which the troops were
obliged to submit. In the hospital of Sultzen, although put upon four full
rations, he was obliged to wander about the establishment to feed upon any
substance he could find however revolting, to subdue his voracious hunger.
These singular powers induced several physicians to ascertain how far
these omnivorous inclinations could carry him in his unnatural cravings.
In presence of Dr. Lorentz he devoured a live cat, commencing by tearing
open its stomach, and sucking the animal's blood with delight. What was
more singular, after this horrible feast, like other carnivorous brutes,
he rejected the fur and skin. Snakes were to him a delicious meal, and he
swallowed them alive and whole, after grinding their heads between his
teeth. One of the surgeons, Mr. Courville, gave him a wooden lancet-case
to swallow in which a written paper had been folded. This case was
rejected undigested, and the paper being found intact, it became a
question whether he might not be employed to convey secret correspondence;
but having been taken up at the Prussian outposts as a spy, being
disguised as a peasant without a knowledge of the language, he received a
severe bastinado, which effectually cured him of an appetite for secret
service, and on his return he had recourse to the safer means of obtaining
food in kitchens, slaughter-houses, and dunghills. At last, a child of
fourteen months old having disappeared under suspicious circumstances, he
was driven out of the hospital, and lost sight of for four years, when he
applied for admission into the hospital of Versailles, in a state of
complete exhaustion, labouring under a violent diarrhoea, which
terminated his hateful existence in his twenty-sixth year. He was of the
middle size, pale, thin, and weak; his countenance was by no means
ferocious, but, on the contrary, displayed much timidity; his fair hair
was remarkably fine and soft; his mouth was very large, and one could
scarcely say that he had any lips; all his teeth were sound, but their
enamel was speckled; his skin was always hot, in a state of perspiration,
and exhaling a constant offensive vapour. When fasting, the integuments of
his abdomen were so flaccid that he could nearly wrap them round him.
After his meals the exhalation from his surface was increased, his eyes
and cheeks became turgid with blood, and, dropping into a state of
drowsiness, he used to seek some obscure corner where he might quietly lie
down and digest. After his death, all the abdominal viscera were found in
a state of ulceration.
Instances are recorded where a similar facility to swallow fluids had been
observed. At Strasburg the stomach of a hussar was exhibited who could
drink sixty quarts of wine in an hour. Pliny mentions a Milanese, named
_Novellus Torquatus_, who, in presence of Tiberius, drank three _congii_
of wine. Seneca and Tacitus knew a man of the name of Piso who could drink
incessantly for two days and two nights; and Rhodiginus mentions a
capacious monster called _the Funnel_, down whose throat an amphora of
liquor could be poured without interruption.
To what are we to attribute these uncommon, nay, these unnatural
faculties? Neither physiological experiments during life, nor anatomical
investigation after death, have hitherto enabled us to form an opinion.
Great as the progress of science has been, we are still doubtful as to the
nature of the digestive process. All the hypotheses on the subject are
liable to insuperable objections. Hippocrates and Empedocles attributed
digestion to the _putrefaction_ of food. Experiments have clearly
demonstrated the fallacy of this doctrine: rejected food is never in a
state of putridity; on the contrary, meat in a perfect state of
putrescence has been restored to sweetness and freshness on being received
into the stomach. Dead snakes have been found with animal substances,
part of which had been swallowed and the remainder hanging out of their
mouths; when the swallowed portion was fresh, and the portion exposed to
the atmosphere in a state of corruption. Galen, and after his school, Grew
and Santarelli, ascribed digestion to a _concoction_, during which, food
was maturated by the stomach's heat, like fruit by the solar rays. Pringle
and Macbride advocated the doctrine of _fermentation_; while Borelli,
Keil, and Pitcairn resolved the question by the mechanism of
_trituration_, making a mill of the stomach, which ground down food,
according to Pitcairn's calculations, with a pressure equal to a weight of
one hundred and seventeen thousand and eighty pounds. Boerhaave
endeavoured to reconcile the opinions of the _concocters_ and _grinders_,
by combining the supposed theory of _concoction_ and _trituration_.
Lastly, Cheselden fancied that digestion was operated by a peculiar
secretion in the stomach, called _gastric juice_; and Haller, Reaumur,
Spallanzani, Blumenbach and most other modern physiologists, concur with
him in the same opinion, although admitting that this function is most
probably assisted by various accessory circumstances.
This juice was found, upon experiment, to be endowed, not only with the
antiseptic power of preserving the contents of the stomach from
putrefaction, but with the property of being a most powerful solvent.
Pieces of the toughest meats and bone have been enclosed in perforated
metallic tubes, and thrust down the stomach of carnivorous birds, and in
the space of about twenty-four hours the meats were found to be
diminished, or, in other words, digested to three-fourths of their bulk,
while the bones had totally disappeared. Dr. Stevens had recourse to a
similar experiment on the human stomach, by means of a perforated ivory
ball, and with the same result. The gastric juice of the dog dissolves
ivory; and that of a hen has dissolved an onyx, and diminished a golden
coin. Not long since, upon examining the stomach and intestines of a man
who died in a public-house, he was found to have been a _polyphagous_
animal, since several clasp-knives that he had swallowed were discovered
with their blades blunted and their handles consumed. Since these
experiments, however, Dr. Montegre of Paris, who was gifted with the
faculty of discharging the contents of his stomach at will, has fully
proved that this gastric juice, when not in an acid state, is subject to
putrefaction when submitted to external animal heat; that this corruption
did not occur when an acid prevailed, and saliva intermixed with vinegar
was equally free from a similar decomposition. He moreover asserts, that
he had recourse to numerous experiments to digest food artificially in
this supposed solvent, but without obtaining results similar to those
advanced by Spallanzani; and, finally, he found little or no difference
between the gastric juice and saliva. This acid, which generally exists in
the gastric juice, has been ascertained by Dr. Prout to be the muriatic,
both free and in combination with alkalis: while Tiedemann and Gmelin
maintain that, in its natural state, no acid is to be met with; but that,
when food is commingled, an acid which they consider the acetic acid is
produced in considerable quantity.[17]
The ostrich, that may be considered a connecting link between birds and
quadrupeds, is gifted with powerful digestive organs, and is known to
swallow stone, glass, and iron; but this faculty appears to be a gift of
all-bounteous Providence, to enable the creature to digest the various
substances it meets with when traversing burning deserts for hundreds of
miles, when these hard bodies actually perform the function of teeth in
the animal's stomach, by aiding the comminution of its indigestible food.
The structure of the ostrich has a near resemblance to that of the camel,
destined to perform the same dreary journeys. The wings are not designed
for flight, and in speed he equals the horse. Adanson affirms that he had
seen two ostriches at the factory of Podore, that were broken in to carry
single or double riders, and the strongest and youngest would run more
swiftly with two negroes on his back than the fleetest racer.
Spallanzani endeavoured to prove that the pebbles and gravel swallowed by
various birds were of no use in the process of digestion; but Hunter, who
had found two hundred pebbles in the gizzard of a turkey, and one thousand
in that of a goose, demonstrated their utility in the trituration of their
food, since these birds were found to be unable to digest, and
consequently to thrive upon their nourishment when deprived of this
mechanical aid. It is curious that the owl, which easily digests meat and
bones, cannot be made to digest bread or grain, and yet dies if confined
to animal food. The eagle, and other birds of prey, can dissolve both. A
singular process of digestion is observed in the stormy petrel, which
lives entirely on oil and fat substances whenever it can obtain them; but
when fed with other articles of food, Nature, true to her laws, converts
them into oil; the bird still discharges pure oil at objects that offend
him, and feeds his young with the same substance. The petrel must, no
doubt, be a bilious subject, for he delights in misery, and his presence
is a sure presage of foul weather to the experienced seamen; and when
The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves,
he is seen riding triumphantly on the whirlwind, and skimming the deepest
chasms of the angry waves. This bird is said to be named 'petrel' from
Peter, since, like that saint, he is supposed to have the power of walking
on the waters.
The singular appetites which have been noticed seem to have been
individual peculiarities, uninfluenced by a morbid condition; but there
are cases in which a depraved appetite is symptomatic of disease, where we
see persons otherwise possessed of sound judgment longing, not only for
the most improper and indigestible food, but for substances of the most
extraordinary and even disgusting nature. Thus we have seen patients, more
especially young females and pregnant women, devouring dirt, cinders,
spiders, leeches, hair, tallow, and paper. An ingenious writer affirms
that "more literature in the form of paper and printed books has been thus
devoured, than by the first scholars in Christendom."
Dr. Darwin tells us that he saw a young lady about ten years of age that
used to fill her stomach with earth out of a flowerpot, and then vomited
it up, with small stones, bits of wood, and wings of various insects. John
Hunter has described an endemic disease among the Africans in Jamaica, in
which they devoured dirt. Mason Good, when speaking of this affection,
says, "that the longing for such materials is, in this disease, a mere
symptom, and rarely shows itself till the frame is completely exhausted by
atrophy, dropsy, and hectic fever, brought on by a longing of a much more
serious kind,--a longing to return home, a pining for the relations, the
scenes, the kindnesses the domestic joys, of which the miserable sufferers
have been robbed by barbarians less humanized than themselves, and which
they have been forced or trepanned to resign for the less desirable
banquet of whips, and threats, and harness, and hunger."
Roderic a Castro relates the case of a lady who could eat twenty pounds of
pepper, and another who lived upon ice. Tulpius mentions a woman who,
during her pregnancy, longed for salt herrings, and ate fourteen hundred
at the rate of five herrings per diem. Longius affirms that a lady in
Cologne, who was in that state that ladies wish to be who love their
lords, took such a fancy to taste the flesh of her husband that she
actually assassinated him, and, after indulging in as much fresh meat as
the weather permitted, salted the remainder for further use. This cannibal
inclination seems not to be uncommon. The said Roderic a Castro knew a
woman in the same thriving condition, who felt an inexpressible desire for
a bit of the shoulder of a neighbouring baker, and her husband was
persecuted by her constant prayers and lamentations to prevail on the
worthy man to allow her one bite for charity's sake: but the first bite
was so heartily inflicted, that the crusty baker would not submit to a
second.
In the Philosophical Transactions there is a case related of a woman whose
fancies were not quite so solid, and who used to gratify her aerial
appetites by putting the nozle of a bellows down her throat, and blowing
away until she was tired. These longings of parturient women are most
common; but it is rather curious, that, among our negroes in the West
Indies, the husbands pretend to long for their wives, and endeavour to
gratify them by proxy. Possibly such might have been the fancy of Cambes,
the Lydian prince, who, according to Aelian, took it into his head one
night to eat up his beloved wife.