Who Was William Beaumont And How Did He Find Out What Goes On In The Stomach?

William Beaumont lived from 1785 to 1853 and he was an American surgeon. He was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, on 21 November 1785 and spent his childhood on the family farm before working as a school teacher and then studying medicine at Vermont. He started his career as a surgeon in the US army in 1812.

Ten years later, he was called on to treat a young French Canadian trapper called Alexis St Martin who had received a very bad shotgun wound to the abdomen. He nearly died but Beaumont managed to save his life. He could not heal the wound – although there was no infection and healing did take place, Martin was left with a permanent fistula – a hole in the skin of his abdomen that went right through to his stomach.

Over the next two years, he needed constant medical care but Beaumont also took the chance to do some experiments on what happened in the exposed stomach. Beaumont made the first accurate study of gastric juice and learned a great deal about the human digestive system.

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