Beaumont, William (1785–1853)
William Beaumont, army surgeon and pioneer physiologist, was born at Lebanon, Connecticut, November 21, 1785, son of Samuel Beaumont, a Puritan New England farmer. He was the first to study the gastric juice obtained through a permanent fistula. His early education was such as to qualify him on attaining his majority for teaching school at Champlain, Clinton County, New York. At the same time he began to study medicine with Dr. Seth Pomeroy of Champlain, New York, and continued it with Dr. Benjamin Chandler of St. Albans, Vermont. He secured a license to practise from the Third Medical Society of Vermont, but on December 2, 1812, enlisted as surgeon's mate in the Sixteenth Regiment Infantry, United States Army. During April and May, 1813, he saw something of war surgery at the taking of York (now Toronto) where the retreating English exploded hundreds of barrels of powder under the feet of the advancing Americans, at the storming of Fort George May 27, 1813, and at the battle of Plattsburg, New York, September 11, 1813. During the latter the physicians were compelled to pass and repass from fort to fort and block houses, exposed to a cross fire of round and grape shot in dressing the wounds of the injured, but none failed to exhibit a soldier-like bravery. Dr. Beaumont stood actual test of facing death in caring for the injured. In 1815 he resigned and engaged in general practice at Ogdensburg, New York. On November 4, 1819, he re-entered the army as post surgeon and was assigned to Mackinac Island, Michigan, reporting to Gen. Macomb, June, 1820. While surgeon's mate he won the confidence of Dr. Joseph Lovell (q.v.), the first surgeon-general, and was offered but refused a thousand dollar clerkship in his consulting-room at Washington and many favors were given him during his army service helpful in his investigations of stomach digestion.
On June 6, 1822, occurred the accident to Alexis St. Martin, which left the walls of the stomach open by a valve, permitting a complete study of the processes of stomach digestion in both normal and abnormal conditions. In a memorial to the United States Senate, Beaumont describes the wound as "being under the left breast made by the accidental discharge of a shot gun at about two feet. A large portion of the side was blown off, ribs fractured and openings made into the pleural cavity and the abdomen, through which protruded portions of the lungs and stomach, much lacerated and burnt. The diaphragm was lacerated and a perforation made directly into the cavity of the stomach through which food was escaping when first seen." At the end of ten months the wound was partially healed, but St. Martin was altogether helpless. It was alleged that Beaumont purposely kept St. Martin's stomach open with a view to conducting experiments but Beaumont's manuscripts prove conclusively, according to Dr. Jesse S. Myer, that he made every possible effort to close the orifice. During the four years that St. Martin was lost to view the opening did not close and was in exactly the same condition when experiments were resumed in 1829. The civil authorities refused to longer provide for his needs and proposed to send him to his home in lower Canada more than fifteen hundred miles distant.
Beaumont was now thirty-seven years old with a wife and three children at a frontier army post, as assistant surgeon in the army, with a salary of $40 a month and four rations. Knowing that such a journey would be fatal to St. Martin, Beaumont took him into his own home, and for two years clothed, fed, nursed, doctored, and sheltered the helpless, suffering, and destitute invalid. In May, 1825, St. Martin was able to walk and help himself a little though unable to provide for his necessities. Now Beaumont kept him for the purpose of making observations and experiments. Two years later (1827) Beaumont communicated his studies to the Michigan Medical Society, of which he had been an honorary member since June 4, 1825. In 1900 the Michigan Medical Society erected a monument of stone, hard by the spot where these immortal studies were begun, and in a memorial meeting expressed its appreciation of Beaumont's contribution to the world's progress. In June, 1825, Beaumont was ordered to Fort Niagara, New York, taking St. Martin with him and continuing his studies. In August they visited Plattsburg, New York, and Burlington, Vermont, where St. Martin took "Dutch leave" of Beaumont.
While at Fort Niagara, June and July, 1825, Beaumont was principal witness in the court martial trial of Lieut. E. B. Griswold, for trying to shirk duty by feigning sickness. Beaumont, suspecting a fraud, prescribed a mixture of 20 grains of calomel with 6 grains of tartar emetic. On hearing the nature of the prescription ordered for his illness, Griswold returned to duty. The court found Griswold guilty but the president reversed the decision and criticised Beaumont. The doctor's reply
