LONG BEFORE DIGESTION researchers had veterans’ stool and Model Guts to play with, they had Alexis St. Martin. In the early 1800s, St. Martin worked as a trapper for the American Fur Company in what is now Michigan. At age eighteen, he was accidently shot in the side. The wound healed as an open fistulated passage, the hole in his stomach fusing with the overlying holes in the muscles and skin. St. Martin’s surgeon, William Beaumont, recognized the value of the unusual aperture as a literal window into the actions of the human stomach and its mysterious juices, about which, up until that point, nothing much was known.
Experiment 1 began at noon on August 1, 1825. “I introduced through the perforation, into the stomach, the following articles of diet, suspended by a silk string: . . . a piece of high seasoned à la mode beef; a piece of raw salted fat pork; a piece of raw salted lean beef; . . . a piece of stale bread; and a bunch of raw sliced cabbage; . . . the lad continuing his usual employment about the house.”
On the very first day of his research career, Beaumont’s work dealt a bruising blow to Fletcherism*—seventy-five years before it was invented: “2 p.m. Found the cabbage, bread, pork, and boiled beef all cleanly digested and gone from the string.” No chewing necessary.* Only the raw beef remained intact.
Beaumont carried out more than a hundred experiments on St. Martin and eventually published a book on the work, securing his place in the history of medicine. Textbooks today still make reference to Beaumont, often with hyperbolic phrasing: “the father of American physiology,” “the patron saint of American physiology.” From the perspective of Alexis St. Martin, there was nothing saintly or fatherly about him.
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* He did, however, leave the residue of his estate to Harvard, part of which went toward funding the Horace Fletcher Prize. This was to be awarded each year for “the best thesis on the subject ‘Special Uses of Circumvallate Papilli and the Saliva of the Mouth in Regulating Physiological Economy in Nutrition.’” Harvard’s Prize Office has no record of anyone applying for, much less winning, the prize.
* The two parted ways over feces. Kellogg’s healthful ideal was four loose logs a day; Fletcher’s was a few dry balls once a week. It got personal. “His tongue was heavily coated and his breath was highly malodorous,” sniped Kellogg.
? I managed to track down only one stanza. It was enough. “I choose to chew because I wish to do the sort of thing that Nature had in view / Before bad cooks invented sav’ry stew / When the only way to eat was to chew, chew, chew.”
* “Vesuvius is puking lava at an alarming rate.”
* A summary of Chittenden’s project appears in the June 1903 issue of Popular Science Monthly, on the same page as an account of the Havre Two-Legged Horse, a foal born without forelegs, resembling a kangaroo “but with less to console it, since the latter has legs in front, which, while small and short are better than none at all.” On a more upbeat note, the foal was “very healthy and obtains its food from a goat.”
* “Put 2 and ? pounds of guano with 3 qts of water in an enamel stew-pan, boil for 3 or 4 hours, then let it cool. Separate the clear liquid, and about a quart of this healthy extract is obtained.” Use sparingly, cautions the author, or it “will be as repugnant as pepper or vinegar.”
* The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
? “It can even vomit,” boasts its designer. No reply arrived in response to an e-mail asking whether and into what the Model Gut excretes.
* More recently, the digestive action of a healthy adult male obliterated everything but 28 bones (out of 131) belonging to a segmented shrew swallowed without chewing. (Debunking Fletcher wasn’t the intent. The study served as a caution to archaeologists who draw conclusions about human and animal diets based on the skeletal remains of prey items.) The shrew, but not the person who ate it, was thanked in the acknowledgments, leading me to suspect that the paper’s lead author, Peter Stahl, had done the deed. He confirmed this, adding that it went down with the help of “a little bit of spaghetti sauce.”
* The Beaumont findings were pointed out to Fletcher in a discussion that followed a lecture of his at a 1909 dental convention in Rochester, New York. “It made no practical difference whether the food was previously masticated very thoroughly, or whether the morsel . . . was introduced . . . in one solid chunk,” said an audience member. Before Fletcher could reply, two more doctors chimed with opinions on this and that. By the time Fletcher spoke again, two pages farther into the transcript, the mention of Beaumont was either forgotten or conveniently ignored. At any rate, Fletcher didn’t address it.
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Hard to Stomach
THE ACID RELATIONSHIP OF WILLIAM BEAUMONT AND ALEXIS ST. MARTIN