Physiologic and Functional Anomalies : Depraved Appetites

Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
by George M. Gould, M.D., Walter L. Pyle, M.D.

(Page 22 of 50)

Bijoux speaks of a porter or garcon at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris who was a prodigious glutton. He had eaten the body of a lion that had died of disease at the menagerie. He ate with avidity the most disgusting things to satiate his depraved appetite. He showed further signs of a perverted mind by classifying the animals of the menagerie according to the form of their excrement, of which he had a collection. He died of indigestion following a meal of eight pounds of hot bread.

Percy saw the famous Tarrare, who died at Versailles, at about twenty-six years of age. At seventeen he weighed 100 pounds. He ate a quarter of beef in twenty-four hours. He was fond of the most revolting things. He particularly relished the flesh of serpents and would quickly devour the largest. In the presence of Lorenze he seized a live cat with his teeth, eventrated it, sucked its blood, and ate it, leaving the bare skeleton only. In about thirty minutes he rejected the hairs in the manner of birds of prey and carnivorous animals. He also ate dogs in the same manner. On one occasion it was said that he swallowed a living eel without chewing it; but he had first bitten off its head. He ate almost instantly a dinner that had been prepared for 15 vigorous workmen and drank the accompanying water and took their aggregate allowance of salt at the same time. After this meal his abdomen was so swollen that it resembled a balloon. He was seen by Courville, a surgeon-major in a military hospital, where he had swallowed a wooden box wrapped in plain white paper. This he passed the next day with the paper intact. The General-in-chief had seen him devour thirty pounds of raw liver and lungs. Nothing seemed to diminish his appetite. He waited around butcher-shops to eat what was discarded for the dogs. He drank the bleedings of the hospital and ate the dead from the dead-houses. He was suspected of eating a child of fourteen months, but no proof could be produced of this. He was of middle height and was always heated and sweating. He died of a purulent diarrhea, all his intestines and peritoneum being in a suppurating condition.

Fulton mentions a girl of six who exhibited a marked taste for feeding on slugs, beetles, cockroaches, spiders, and repulsive insects. This child had been carefully brought up and was one of 13 children, none of whom displayed any similar depravity of appetite. The child was of good disposition and slightly below the normal mental standard for her age. At the age of fourteen her appetite became normal.

In the older writings many curious instances of abnormal appetite are seen. Borellus speaks of individuals swallowing stones, horns, serpents, and toads. Plater mentions snail-eating and eel-eating, two customs still extant. Rhodius is accredited with seeing persons who swallowed spiders and scorpions. Jonston says that Avicenna, Rufus, and Gentilis relate instances of young girls who acquired a taste for poisonous animals and substances, who could ingest them with impunity. Colonia Agrippina was supposed to have eaten spiders with impunity. Van Woensel is said to have seen persons who devoured live eels.

The habit of dirt eating or clay-eating, called pica, is well authenticated in many countries. The Ephemerides contains mention of it; Hunter speaks of the blacks who eat potters' clay; Bartholinus describes dirt-eating as does also a Castro. Properly speaking, dirt-eating should be called geophagism; it is common in the Antilles and South America, among the low classes, and is seen in the negroes and poorest classes of some portions of the Southern United States. It has also been reported from Java, China, Japan, and is said to have been seen in Spain and Portugal. Peat-eating or bog-eating is still seen in some parts of Ireland.

There were a number of people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had formed the habit of eating small pebbles after each meal. They formed the habit from seeing birds swallowing gravel after eating. A number of such cases are on record.

There is on record the account of a man living in Wurtemberg who with much voracity had eaten a suckling pig, and sometimes devoured an entire sheep. He swallowed dirt, clay, pebbles, and glass, and was addicted to intoxication by brandy. He lived sixty years in this manner and then he became abstemious; he died at seventy-nine. His omentum was very lean, but the liver covered all his abdominal viscera. His stomach was very large and thick, but the intestines were very narrow.

Ely had a patient who was addicted to chalk-eating; this ha said invariably relieved his gastric irritation. In the twenty-five years of the habit he had used over 1/2 ton of chalk; but notwithstanding this he always enjoyed good health. The Ephemerides contains a similar instance, and Verzascha mentions a lime-eater. Adams mentions a child of three who had an instinctive desire to eat mortar. This baby was rickety and had carious teeth. It would pick its preferred diet out of the wall, and if prevented would cry loudly. When deprived of the mortar it would vomit its food until this substance was given to it again. At the time of report part of the routine duties of the sisters of this boy was to supply him with mortar containing a little sand. Lime-water was substituted, but he insisted so vigorously on the solid form of food that it had to be replaced in his diet. He suffered from small-pox; on waking up in the night with a fever, he always cried for a piece of mortar. The quantity consumed in twenty-four hours was about 1/2 teacupful. The child had never been weaned.