Whenever I read articles about things that happened hundreds of years ago, I always think that most of it was made up along the way, so I take it with a boulder of salt.
Does anyone know how accurate these sorts of records are?
This isn't something that got passed down like a children's game of "telephone"; the outlandish details are present in the original contemporaneous accounts and we have copies of them (digitized even! [1]). So, if it was made up, it was at least made up at the time.
However, the person making the claim is Pierre-François Percy [2], chief surgeon of Napoleon's Grande Armée and a member of the Académie des sciences and, later, honorary member of the Académie Royale de Médecine. Inventing a case like this would be wildly out of character.
Reflexively dismissing every story from the past is just as fallacious as believing every detail.
This thing reads more like a campfire story. I also wonder how much of this is real and how much is the inevitable embellishment added over the past more than 2 centuries.
>Eating his body weight in a day? That's pretty outlandish and easily debunked.
no. I don't understand what you're basing your claim on. As far as i see it is easily possible. Even with anatomically normal gut some stuff can make from mouth to the other end in as short as 30 minutes. So the bandwidth is there (say it takes 1 hour to make through the 7m length of the gut pipe which say of 4 square centimeter section - that is 2.8 liter/hour speed) . The story of that guy says that he had severe diarrhea and overall really suggests that he had severe gut bacterial issues - that is one of the situations when stuff makes it very quickly through the gut.
He is described as of a small weight despite significant food intake - that again matches the situation of the food quickly passing through instead of thorough digestion. He is described as constantly scavenging and eating - say 15 hours a day 4 kg/hour (in the ballpark of the above mentioned 2.8l/hour) gives you 60kg. 4kg/hour quickly moving non-stop though the gut does sound like a severe diarrhea.
Turns out there's an entire academic field dedicated to this question! And a word for the concept: historiography! And over centuries, tens of thousands of academic historians have worked out any number of methods for assessing this sort of thing... there's even a history of historiography on the Wikipedia page about it! But you know, who knows if anything reported there is accurate?
If they're consistent, you'd have to explain how can multiple actors imagine a similar story (assuming those witnesses didn't interact). You can use probabilistic reasoning to determine whether a large portion of the story is close to reality.
I feel like there is a difference between "we saw something between the trees! It must have been the bigfoot!" and "we gave this guy a cat and he ate it whole in front of us".
> His performances involved the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and other materials. He disassembled, cut up, and consumed bicycles, shopping carts, televisions, and a Cessna 150,among other items. The Cessna 150 took roughly two years to be "eaten", from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material as a teenager, at around 16 years of age,[4] and performed publicly beginning in 1966.[citation needed] Lotito had an eating disorder known as pica. Doctors determined that Lotito also had a thick lining in his stomach and intestines which allowed his consumption of sharp metal without suffering injury
Indoor wonder if it's a coincidence both these guys were French....
Does anyone know how accurate these sorts of records are?