THE MAN WITH A WINDOW IN HIS STOMACH
Before there was informed consent...there were fur trappers.
BEGIN WITH ONE HOLE…
When the Canadian fur trapper Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot at close range by a musket, he could have easily died. The musket fired on June 6, 1822, on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron blasted through his ribs and stomach and exposed his internal organs. He lost muscle tissue, rib bones were broken, and a hole was torn in his stomach. Many expected the 20-year-old to die.
Dr. William Beaumont, a U.S. Army surgeon from nearby Fort Mackinac attended to St. Martin’s wounds. For 17 days, St. Martin could not digest food. Everything he ate came out of an opening in his side. He had to receive nutrition through enemas to stay alive. Gradually, he healed and his eating returned to normal. But the hole that had torn through his abdomen, and his stomach never fully closed. In fact, he healed in a very peculiar way. The edge of the hole in his stomach fused to the edge of the hole in his skin creating a “window” into St. Martin’s digestive tract.
...ADD A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE...FOR A PRICE
Scientists at the time knew very little about how the digestive system worked. Seeing the unique way that St. Martin was healing, Beaumont saw an opportunity. In an arrangement that would be seen as entirely unethical today, the doctor convinced St. Martin to work as his servant. He would be paid to chop wood and fetch bundles. The young man also allowed Dr. Beaumont to experiment on him.
Dr. Beaumont tied quarter-ounce bits of food to string and dangled them into the hole in St. Martin’s side. The food items were “high seasoned alamode beef,” raw salted lean beef, raw salted fat pork, raw lean fresh beef, boiled corned beef, stale bread, and raw cabbage. After inserting the food, the doctors would send St. Martin back to work. After different time intervals—one, two, and three hours—he’d pull the food out and note how the food had been digested. The doctor used not only his fingers and instruments to examine St. Martin but also his tongue. Dr. Beaumont thought he could obtain a measure of alkalinity by “tasting” the wound for sourness. Dr. Beaumont also removed gastric juices from St. Martin and observed how they reacted with a piece of corned beef in a “test tube–style” environment.
The young man suffered through much probing and physical distress. Beaumont remarked that “the boy complained of some pain and uneasiness at the breast.” After two months of prodding and experiments, St. Martin returned to Quebec, where he married and had children.
STIR AS NEEDED
Over the next eight years, St. Martin returned to visit with the doctor and conduct further experiments. In June of 1829, St. Martin brought his wife and family. Among other things, Dr. Beaumont learned that gastric juice needed heat to digest and that vegetables took longer to digest than other foods. Because St. Martin became understandably irritable during some tests, the doctor was able to determine that anger hindered digestion. The doctor was living in Wisconsin at this time, and when the round of experiments was completed, St. Martin and his family actually traveled by canoe and portage back to their home in Montreal.
In 1832, the two met one last time. The doctor observed the effects of sausage, mutton, and “boiled salted fat pork” being placed in St. Martin. One time, he put 12 raw oysters directly into his stomach. He found that exercise helped the production and release of gastric juice. Along the way, the doctor also made the groundbreaking discovery that digestion was mainly a chemical (as opposed to mechanical) process.
FOLLOW WITH JUST DESSERTS
After Beaumont’s experiments came to an end, he took his copious notes and wrote a book titled Experiments and Observations of the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. The book became an important guide for scientists and others who wanted to understand more about human digestion.
St. Martin, who was expected to die as a young man, lived until the ripe old age of 78. The doctor died at age 68 from a slip on some icy stairs.
To make a symbolic mace for its first legislature in 1906, Alberta used plumbing pipe, a shaving mug, cup handles and scraps of wood, and then painted it gold.