William Beaumont
1785-1853
American Physician and Physiologist
William Beaumont, physician and physiologist, achieved international fame for the research on human digestion he performed on Alexis St. Martin, who became known as "the man with a hole in his stomach." Beaumont's work is important not only in terms of his scientific observations, but as a landmark in the history of human experimentation and biomedical ethics.
Beaumont was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, into a poor farming family. Although Beaumont had little formal education, he was able to leave the family farm at age twenty-one and become schoolmaster in the village of Champlain, New York. His teaching position allowed him to save enough money to become a medical apprentice to Dr. Benjamin Chandler. The year that Beaumont spent with Chandler was his only formal medical training. Nevertheless, Beaumont joined the army as surgeon's mate during the War of 1812. Attempts to establish a private practice after the war were unsuccessful and Beaumont reenlisted in the Medical Department of the army.
Beaumont was sent to Fort Mackinac, which was then a remote army post on the Western frontier. Mackinac Island, in the straits of the Great Lakes, was an outpost of the American Fur Company. In addition to his work as post surgeon, Beaumont was allowed to establish a private medical practice in order to earn enough money to marry Deborah Green Platt and support a family.
On June 6, 1822, Alexis St. Martin, a young French Canadian, was accidentally shot in the abdomen at very close range. Beaumont thought the wound would be fatal, but he cared for St. Martin to the best of his ability with poultices offlour, charcoal, yeast, and hot water. He changed the dressings frequently, cleaned the wound, removed debris, and bled the patient to fight against fever. Surprisingly, St. Martin survived, but all attempts to close the wound were unsuccessful. Rather than allow the young man to make the difficult journey back to Canada, Beaumont hired St. Martin as a household servant. Although Beaumont was largely self-taught in physiology, as well as medicine, he soon realized that St. Martin's permanent gastrostomy (new opening into the stomach) provided a unique opportunity to study digestion in a healthy human being. He was able to conduct experiments that tested many contemporary theories of human digestion. Beaumont was able to insert and remove various kinds of foods from St. Martin's stomach and determine how long it took to digest them. Beaumont paid a small wage to St. Martin and planned to conduct lecture tours to demonstrate his experiments, but St. Martin frequently ran away. In 1832 Beaumont and St. Martin signed a contract that gave Beaumont the exclusive right to perform experiments on St. Martin. This document was the first such contract in the history of human scientific experimentation.
In 1833 Beaumont published his landmark work on human digestion, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. In his introduction, Beaumont assured the reader that the experimental procedures had caused no harm to St. Martin. He also emphasized his lack of formal training and claimed that this allowed him to make observations and conclusions without the distortion caused by allegiance to previous theories. His book provides a detailed case history of experimental results, a review of the scientific literature related to his researches, and various attacks on scientists who had reached conclusions different from his own. Beaumont is remembered as the first investigator to provide a detailed, experimentally based description of normal human digestion. Despite his lack of formal training, he became a pioneer of physiology and an outstanding figure in American medical and scientific history.
William Beaumont and Medical Malpractice
The last decades of William Beaumont's life were embittered by his involvement in two medical malpractice battles. Beaumont had unsuccessfully attempted to save the life of a man who had been attacked by Darnes Davis, a carpenter. Davis had struck his victim on the head with an iron cane. Beaumont attempted to relieve cranial pressure by performing a trephination (removal of a circular piece of bone). When the case came to trial in 1840, Davis's lawyers argued that Beaumont had caused the death by drilling a hole into the victim's skull in order to perform experiments on the brain, just as he had left a hole in St. Martin's stomach in order to do experiments on the digestion. Only four years later, Beaumont was involved in a medical malpractice lawsuit filed by Mary Dugan. Although Beaumont was acquitted, the case created a great deal of hostility in the medical community of St. Louis.
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