Medicine: Through a Stomach Hole

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For three years Dr. Beaumont tried to close the hole in the boy's stomach. Ultimately a flap grew over the hole and retained food in the stomach. But any time he wished Dr. Beaumont could push the flap away and see what was going on within the stomach. This inquisitiveness made him think of starting a research within the processes of digestion, concerning which knowledge was hypothetical. Alexis St. Martin grew impatient with the experiments, ran away to his Canadian home, married, and fathered two children before Beaumont could find him, through fur trappers.

Experiments on St. Martin's digestion continued. When Dr. Beaumont had made and recorded 238 protocols, he published at his own expense 1,000 poorly printed copies of Experiments & Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. It was the first thoroughgoing, precise study of its subject matter, and was the first significant U.S. contribution to Medicine. Copies of the book in good condition are now worth $50.

Beaumont published his book in 1833. Earlier this centennial year the Philadelphia College of Physicians, the University of California Medical School and the Wayne County (Detroit) Medical Society (among others) conducted memorial meetings and exhibits. This week the New York Academy of Medicine begins an elaborate commemoration with some 300 Beaumont items on display—photostats of private papers (from Washington University, St. Louis, whose medical school Beaumont helped found ), photographic reproductions of every Beaumont portrait known, and two photographs of Alexis St. Martin.

Dr. Beaumont was unable to do everything he wished with St. Martin's stomach. Shortly after the book's publication the French Canadian returned home for good. Dr. Beaumont ultimately resigned from the Army medical corps, established himself in St. Louis. There his reputation as a peerer into organs threw him into court. He had trephined a broken skull. Hostile doctors testified that he had done so to see what was going on in the dying man's brain. The court acquitted Dr. Beaumont. In 1853, aged 67, he slipped on an icy flight of steps, developed a carbuncle on his neck, died within a month.

Tough Alexis St. Martin lived on at St. Thomas de Jolliette, Ont. to be 83. His family buried him eight feet deep "to make difficult attempts at resurrection."

Last week at Evanston, Ill. died another hero in stomach annals: Ajax, 9, a dog whose stomach Physiologist Andrew Conway Ivy cut out six years ago to demonstrate that in necessity a person could thrive without that apparatus.