Hero of the Week 90

 Welcome back viewers

This week we will honor a team of heroes

They are:

Dr. William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin

William Beaumont was an American surgeon from Lebanon, Connecticut. Alexis St. Martin was a Canadian voyageur from Berthierville, Quebec. They grew up in different settings and aimed to pursue different careers in life. Little did they know, their lives were on a collision course. One that would change the course of medical history.

On June 6, 1822, Alexis was working at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island. All of a sudden, a musket discharged and struck him in the side of his torso. William Beaumont arrived on the scene and did his best to treat the gaping wound in Alexis's stomach. Despite Dr. Beaumont's best efforts, Alexis was not expected to survive. The blast had torn out pieces of his stomach muscles, cracked his ribs, perforated his diaphragm, and exposed a lung. 

Beaumont refused to give up. For the next 17 days, he treated St. Martin by bleeding him and giving him a cathartic (similar to a laxative) that allowed him digest food. To everyone's astonishment, Alexis began to recover and get his strength back. By the end of the month he could eat on his own and get out of bed. However there was still one exception. In the two and half weeks he was being treated, his fist-sized gunshot wound had not closed. Instead, it had healed to form a fistula aperture. In other words, Alexis St. Martin now had a gaping hole in his stomach that could not be closed (Beaumont drew a sketch of it).

Dr. Beaumont however, saw this as a major scientific opportunity. The hole in St. Martin's torso had also exposed his digestive system. Beaumont realized that he could observe the mechanics of human digestion and present them to the scientific community. Although he was reluctant to do so, Alexis St. Martin agreed to become an experiment for Beaumont in exchange for payment. 

For the next year, Beaumont conducted a series of science experiments on St. Martin's open stomach cavity. His most common practice was to dangle a piece of food from a string (beef, pork, stale bread, and red cabbage), lower it into the hole, and then withdraw it after a period of time. Beaumont observed and concluded that the food was dissolved and digested due to gastric juices inside the stomach. 

After at least two years of experiments, William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin parted ways. Four years later, they bumped into each other again. To Beaumont's astonishment Alexis revealed that he was in desperate need of money and volunteered to become a test subject again. From 1829 to 1833, Beaumont conducted another 200 experiments on St. Martin until they parted ways for good.

William Beaumont published an account of his findings in 1838. Ultimately he had made at least 51 conclusions about human digestion based on his experiments on St Martin. Beaumont became known as the, "Father of Gastric Physiology" by the scientific community. He passed away on April 25, 1853. Alexis St. Martin continued to work as a laborer in Canada. He lived with his deformity for the rest of his life. He passed away on June 24, 1880. His family refused to bury him until his body had decomposed in order to prevent anymore experiments by any other "curious doctors".

The strange relationship between William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin ultimately led to some of the greatest achievements and advances in the medical field. Although the issue of human experimentation is a hotly debated topic, there is no question that in this case, it had yielded astounding results. These results helped to expand the knowledge of the human body and save many lives in the future. William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin's story is one that definitely deserves to be told.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/grisly-story-human-guinea-pig-alexis-st-martin-180963520/

https://hekint.org/2020/02/06/william-beaumont-and-alexis-st-martin/

https://mynorth.com/2017/05/the-gruesome-medical-breakthrough-of-dr-william-beaumont-on-mackinac-island/

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/probing-the-mysteries-of-human-digestion