Overview

At the beginning of the 1800s the process of digestion was a mystery wrapped in conjecture and debate. During the nineteenth century, however, four men contributed important pieces toward solving the puzzle of digestion. American William Beaumont (1785-1853) first observed the workings of a living person's stomach in a patient with a gunshot wound that did not heal. Englishman William Prout (1785-1850) showed that hydrochloric acid was in digestive juice. German physiologist Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) discovered pepsin, the enzyme responsible for digestion in the stomach. French investigator Claude Bernard (1813-1878) uncovered the roles of the pancreas and liver in digestion and showed that the major organ of digestion was not the stomach but the small intestine. By the end of the century the...