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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that finds it disturbing that it's mentioned that people saw no sign of mental illness in him yet he ate live puppies and kittens, dead bodies from the morgue, and was ejected from the hospital when he was suspected of eating a toddler?

Honestly this whole article is nightmare fuel about what a person might become if all-consuming hunger is the driving urge of their life.

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You are because in 1847, 49 years after Terrare’s death in 1798, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered washing your hands before operations drastically reduced morality would be ignored and ridiculed by his peers for years until he suffered a mental breakdown and was thrown into an insane asylum where he was beaten and died.

Around this same time people still believed that disease was caused by miasma. That is, disease was carried by smell alone. This is why plague doctors in centuries prior had those masks with beaks filled with spices and aromatics; cannot smell the disease? You cannot contract it. Make no mistake though, that was still the common belief until Dr. Jon Snow proved cholera was caused by polluted water and not miasma.

This is a time where if you couldn’t sense something yourself then it wasn’t considered real; its no wonder that mental illness wasn’t (and still isn’t) really taken seriously either in some degree or at all.

AFAIK Semmelweiss acted very cranky before and the forced hospitalization of him in an asylum was a consequence of a long string of hostile incidents.

Once I read some examples of texts written by Semmelweiss; if they were representative, he had a problem, possibly paranoid schizophrenia. This kind of belligerent word salad does not get written by healthy people.

That does not justify his tragic death or diminish his scientific discoveries, of course.

I think the story is embellished a lot.

I also think, though I might have my historical periods wrong, he lived in a time when stray dogs and cats were considered pests and eating puppies and kittens wasn't the weirdest thing.

Okay, maybe the pesky dogs and cats, but surely we can agree on toddlers being past whatever line.

A very modest proposal for a line

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

Definitely embellished. If you try to eat a live cat, it will scratch your face beyond recognition.

Here's a similar case that also purports live cat eating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery

> In one year [Domery] devoured 174 cats (not their skins) dead or alive; and says, he had several severe conflicts of interest in the act of destroying them, by feeling the effects of their torments on his face and hands: sometimes he killed them before eating, but when very hungry, did not wait to perform this humane office

So in that case, the person reporting it is saying the man was indeed scratched up by the cats.

> he lived in a time when stray dogs and cats were considered pests

IIRC, Neutering cats and dogs wasn't common until the 1930s, and before then "getting rid of" the excess offspring was basically mandatory.

https://dogtime.com/dog-health/spay-neuter/34567-history-spa...

Psychiatry is a fairly young field, and mental illness as we think of it today is a relatively recent concept.

There has always been the idea of things such as madness and stupidity, but it wasn't until the 19th century the notion of systematically cataloguing mental illness got much traction.

It wasn't until the 19th century the notion of systematically cataloging anything got much traction. See e.g. how the SI and MKS systems came from this time. This was the point in time where science as an activity got a lot more organized.

To be fair, Aristotle did quite a lot of that too, although the doctrinal position his conclusions came to have held back science for quite a bit.

Aristotle didn't have the data available to the 19th century scientists, but his methodology was surprisingly solid and well grounded.

Linnaeus also did a lot of work in the 18th century, which in many ways paved way for the scientific boom in the 19th century.

Is it so surprising that he wouldn't have been considered mentally ill, especially at the time? Imagine someone who's generally affable, who can more or less hold down a job, who speaks in complete sentences, obeys the usual social rules about manners, dress, and speech --- an ordinary guy --- except that he has a habit of eating a variety of unusual objects. Would you consider him eccentric or would you go straight to mental illness?

I think we're too eager to medicalize personality quirks nowadays. Traditionally, a mental illness is a set of behaviors or beliefs that impair one's general functioning in society. Mere weirdness doesn't count.

Well it is true that weirdness is more of a mental illness over time. The more society becomes rigid and codified and dense, the less room for weirdness to exist, as there are more ways to be transgressive and more people to transgress against.

Stephen Fry's podcast on Victorian England has an episode on exactly this - there was no concept of "disabled" person back then. Either you were "abled bodied" or not. Someone who could work and provide for their family was considered "able bodied", even if they were physically disfigured, missing limbs, having some mental illness or any other issues - if you can be a functional member of the society then you're able bodied.

It's interesting that in the British navy, "Able" seaman was not about disability as we would think about it at all (even though they would, like, climb up ropes or whatever sailors do). It seems much closer to how we'd think of junior engineer/engineer/senior engineer in terms of increasing experience.

I don't see that he had what we would normally classify as a mental disorder. He had a physical disorder which required him to eat constantly, and the quantities of food he required were not easily available, leading him down a dark path where he ate anything and everything. His survival instinct caused him to eat live animals because he was in such a state he did not have time to kill and cook them and realized it did not matter to his body. I guess at some point his instinct was so strong that he stopped seeing animals (including humans) as beings and simply as food to keep him alive. It's fascinatingly morbid.

Yes, exactly. I'm a type 1 diabetic, and episodes of hypoglycemia can cause a survival instinct to eat, and it's possible to lose all sense of rationality in those moments. But nobody would say I have a mental illness after one of those episodes. It's a physical disorder that may or may not have an accompanying mental disorder.

> I guess at some point his instinct was so strong that he stopped seeing animals (including humans) as beings and simply as food to keep him alive.

I think perhaps that would be a mental disorder. If not then, at least now. It might have been caused by real life physical issues, but aren't they often?

You're not you when you're hungry.

Brings a whole new level of hangry. There's so many "I'm so hungry..." quips that have always made me raise an eyebrow in the "wtf does that mean?" level of oddness. Some of the things in this wiki article topped the strangest of what I had heard up until then.

the poultices got me

Indeed. We find it normal after all that people resort to cannibalism when they're too hungry and it has happened many times throught history.

If he felt he was starving afterall he's in the same condtition.

To his credit, he wasn't caught eating the toddler. I imagine he denied doing so, but the rumor persisted.

It was doctors and nurses feeding him puppies and kittens. Who are we saying is mentally ill? I doubt he ate a toddler; the guy we have been feeding live animals is a convenient scapegoat.

Keep in mind that this occurred in the late 18th century. Society was very different from today, or even mid 20th century.

This article seems more of a legend.

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