William Beaumont

William Beaumont (born November 21, 1785 in Lebanon , Connecticut , † April 25, 1853 ) was a surgeon and military doctor in the US Army who researched human digestion.

Life

William Beaumont was born in Lebanon to Samuel and Lucretia Beaumont. He received his training from Dr. Truman Powell in St. Albans , Vermont . During the war in 1812 he served three years as an assistant surgeon in the army. After the war he ran a private practice in Plattsburgh , New York . Beaumont Hill in Antarctica is named in his honor .

Experiments with digestion of the stomach

When the French-Canadian trapper Alexis St. Martin was hit in the stomach with a shotgun on June 6, 1822 , Dr. Beaumont provided first aid. The trapper survived with a fistula in his stomach. Beaumont began his experiments on digestion by putting food on threads through the open folds of skin into the stomach and observing the changes after a few hours. He took a sample of the gastric juice and analyzed it chemically. His research came to the conclusion that food was not processed by a life force but by gastric juice.

After a two-year unauthorized absence , in which St. Martin married in Canada and had two children, Beaumont found him and persuaded him to continue the experiment from 1829 for a contractually agreed payment including accommodation and food. In the next five years, further experiments were carried out, sometimes daily, that made Beaumont famous in the professional world, but without mentioning St. Martin. In 1833 Beaumont published about his research. He died in 1853 from falling on icy steps. When St. Martin died after Beaumont in 1880, more than a quarter of a century, the doctors wanted to autopsy him and send his stomach to a museum. However, his family kept the body to rot and then buried it several meters deep to prevent exhumation .

Web links

Dissertation by George Rosen (1935)

personal data
SURNAME	Beaumont, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American doctor
DATE OF BIRTH	November 21, 1785
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lebanon , Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH	April 25, 1853