French showman and soldier Tarrare exhibited extreme polyphagia, consuming vast quantities of inedible items like live animals, cork, and reportedly human flesh during the Revolutionary era. His case highlighted medical mysteries of appetite and digestion.

Tarrare's bizarre habits have fascinated literary imaginations, inspiring grotesque themes in Romantic and modern poetry exploring the body, excess, and the monstrous. It feeds into narratives of human abnormality and appetite in verse addressing identity and physical limits.