Stone eaters: a difficult way to make easy money (6 photos)

What methods do people resort to in order not to work? But at the same time live in abundance.





Back in the 1600s, a man named Thomas Gobsill was advised to eat pebbles to relieve flatulence. As Kirby's Wonderful and Eccentric Museum (1820) explains, "the stones passed easily through him, and he found great relief." Eventually, he suffered a violent attack, and swallowing the usual nine stones did not help. Then he swallowed nine more. Then another nine. He continued to swallow them until more than two hundred stones filled his stomach. The man could shake and hear them rattling.



After two years of walking like a bag of stones, Gobsil visited a new doctor to complain about them and his inability to digest other foods. But he seems to have received no help: “He has been in the hands of several charlatans, but all the medicines they have used have failed to remove a single stone from him.”

While Gobsil apparently received terrible medical advice that developed a bad habit and made his condition worse, most rock eaters were artists and did what they did to their bodies quite deliberately.





Perhaps the most famous of these showmen was another 17th-century man named Francesco Battaglia, who performed at St. Bartholomew's Fair in London.

His case is described in James Caulfield and Henry Wilson's Book of Marvelous Characters (1869). Battaglia's parents, as the story goes, were told by doctors that the baby "must eat stones" after the baby flatly refused to latch on. For what purpose this was done - history is silent. But in the end, the boy found something he liked and grew up on rocks and the drinks he washed them down with.



His usual practice was to put three or four stones in a spoon and swallow one by one; then he washed down his “lunch” with a glass of water. When you hit your stomach or move, you could hear the stones rattling, as if in a bag.

Of course, rock eaters like this guy didn't actually eat them. Such performers developed powerful regurgitation skills, allowing them to return consumed objects at will.

For training, very small potatoes are used first to avoid accidents. After a person has mastered the skill of returning them painlessly, the size gradually increases until it is possible to swallow and return objects as large as the throat can bear.



Mac Norton

Around this time, French artist Mac Norton performed with various objects, most notably frogs. He swallowed them and brought them back alive and healthy. For this he received the nickname “Aquarium Man”.

One day Norton lost one frog. Colleagues found him very depressed in the dressing room: the thought that he would have to digest a live frog clearly did not add joy to the artist.



Stevie Starr

Today's version is Scot Stevie Starr, a recent finalist on America's Got Talent. Not only does it swallow living things, but it also happily eats many other objects that no one should try to swallow, including coins, billiard balls, nails and, of course, rocks.