The Man Who Ate Everything (2 photos)

You are not yourself when you're hungry. Many people know about the peculiarity of the human mind to make wrong decisions on an empty stomach. But when you are full, life appears in different, more positive colors. It's just that everyone's taste preferences are different. And the gastronomic preferences of some characters are simply baffling.





In the late 19th century, there lived an ordinary man named William W. McKenna who regularly consumed strange objects such as tools, pieces of glass, nails, pieces of cutlery, and even live frogs.



According to an article about his life published in June 1889, the 21-year-old started eating glass by accident. The boy was 14 years old when he worked at the Mayer glass factory in Brooklyn, New York. A little glass dust got into his lunch, and the young man liked it.

Soon the passion for glass consumed the worker so much that the factory owners became alarmed. They discovered that glass supplies were dwindling, a fact they could not explain for some time.

The owners then caught young McKenna eating a broken glass bottle. He confessed his strange addiction, and word of his glass-eating habit spread. Soon he was hired to work at a museum where various living miracles were demonstrated.

There, McKenna could eat as much glass as he wanted in front of the public, rumored to be nine times a day. And so on for many years.



McKenna claimed that this occupation earned him $75 a week, the equivalent of about $2,500 today.

He also ate three large portions of regular food every day. But at the same time, glass was an obligatory component of the diet. One day a man was arrested for climbing onto a lamp post and eating the lamp cap.

The reporter added that there was no sleight of hand or cunning in his actions. That is, even taking into account the fact that glass is very dangerous to pass through the body, he did not spit out the absorbed fragments.

When McKenna disappeared from radar, his fate remained unknown. But there is information about his colleague in the gastronomic perversion workshop. Another entertainer, Joseph Kennedy, who performed in St. Louis, Missouri, also ate nuts, nails, screws and pieces of hardware. Before his death in 1892, he stated that doctors offered him $5,000 for his body in order to examine it and discover some unique form of stomach.

Instead, medical examiners found that "his walls and epithelium were completely normal, but literally filled with nails, screws, staples and broken glass that the man had swallowed." The report also noted that the deceased did not have a single case of injury to any part of the stomach or throat by the points or edges of these objects.