A hole in one man's stomach revealed how digestion works.
In 1822 a young fur trader named Alexis St. Martin was shot at close range and survived with a permanent opening into his stomach. An army surgeon, William Beaumont, spent years lowering food into it on strings, and showed that digestion is mostly chemistry, not grinding.
On 6 June 1822, at a fur-trading post on Mackinac Island in what is now Michigan, a gun went off at close range beside St. Martin, a French-Canadian voyageur. The blast damaged his ribs, a lung and his stomach. William Beaumont, a US Army surgeon at the nearby fort, treated him but did not expect him to live. St. Martin survived, yet as the wound healed, the edge of the hole in his stomach fused with the hole in his skin, leaving a permanent opening called a fistula.
Beaumont realised he had a rare window into a living body. From 1825 he tied pieces of food to string, lowered them into St. Martin's stomach and pulled them out hours later to see how far they had broken down. He also drew off gastric juice and showed that it could digest food in a cup, outside the body altogether. That pointed to a key conclusion: digestion is chiefly a chemical process driven by the stomach's acid, not just the churning of its muscular walls.
Over about 238 experiments up to 1833, Beaumont studied digestion during fasting, after exercise and under different emotional states. His book that year set out 51 conclusions, among them that vegetables are digested more slowly than meat and that gastric juice contains hydrochloric acid made by the stomach lining. He is often called the father of gastric physiology.
The partnership was far from equal. St. Martin was employed as Beaumont's servant, chopping wood between experiments, and some of the tests hurt. He left for Canada more than once and eventually refused to come back. When he died in Quebec in 1880, his family is said to have delayed burial until the body decayed, so that doctors could not claim his stomach. The science was real; so was the question of what a patient owes to research.
Source: Wikipedia — William Beaumont · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
