Beaumont and St. Martin.

On June 6, 1822, at remote Fort Mackinac, in what is now Michigan, a robust and healthy 19-year-old French Canadian fur trapper was accidentally shot. The resulting story of William Beaumont, the surgeon stationed at the fort and Alexis St. Martin, the young trapper, represents one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of American medicine. William Beaumont, the son of a farmer, was born in Lebanon, CT, on November 21 , 1785. He left home at the age of 21 and worked first as a teacher in upper New York state until 1810, when he became an apprentice to a physician in St. Albans, VT. Two years later he received his medical license and soon after was commissioned as a “surgeon’s mate” in the Army. At the close of the War of 1812 he returned to private practice in Plattsburg, NY. However, in 1820, Beaumont again enlisted and was ordered to Fort Mackinac, where the accidental shooting occurred. immediately after St. Martin’s accident, Beaumont found “a portion of the lung as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound. . and below this another protrusion resembling a portion of the stomach. . with a puncture in the protruding portion large enough to receive my forefinger through which a portion of the food he had taken for breakfast had come out.” Much to Beaumont’s surprise, his patient did not die. St. Martin’s stomach adhered to the intercostal muscles and eventually a movable flap developed, coyering the orifice. Fortunately for science, however, Beaumont was not able to completely close the orifice. At the end of the year, St. Martin was judged a pauper and ordered to return 2000 miles to his home in lower Canada. Recognizing that his patient would not survive the journey, Beaumont took him into his own home. The idea of studying St. Martin did not occur to Beaumont until 1825, by which time St. Martin had totally recovered. Shortly after beginning his studies of digestion, using the ready access to St. Martin’s stomach, Beaumont was transferred to Fort Niagara, where he planned to continue his experiments. However, en route, St. Martin disappeared, presumably having returned home. During his service at three additional forts, Beaumont continued to correspond with fur companies in an attempt to find St. Martin. Finally, in 1829, the truant was located in lower Canada, where he had married and become the father of two children. At Beaumont’s expense, the entire family was transferred to Fort Crawford on the upper Mississippi, where, after an interruption of 4 years, experiments were again begun and continued until the spring of 1831, when St. Martin and his family of now four children went home, promising to be available in the future when necessary. A year and a half later, when Beaumont was allowed to transfer to Washington, DC, St. Martin came back and Beaumont completed his experiments during the next year and a half. Early in 1834, St. Martin, “with a lid on his stomach” returned for the last time to Canada, where he lived to the age of 83. Beaumont resigned from the Army in 1844 and had a successful career as a private physician in St. Louis until he died on April 25, 1853. With these intermittent experiments conducted over a 9-year period, Beaumont, with no formal education in medicine or in the methods of experimentation, produced the most important group of