St. Martin was put to work around the house as soon as he was well enough. From the beginning, Beaumont had an eye on the fistula, more or less literally. “When he lies on the opposite side I can look directly into the cavity of the Stomach, and almost see the process of digestion,” wrote Beaumont in his journal. I would love to know how the experimental protocol was first broached. St. Martin had no understanding of scientific method. He was illiterate and spoke little English. He communicated in a French Canadian patois so heavily accented that Beaumont, in his notes from the day of the shooting, transcribed “St. Martin” as “Samata.” Beaumont kept diaries but neither I nor medical ethicist Jason Karlawish, who has written a fine and sleuthfully researched historical novel about the pair, could find mention of St. Martin’s initial reaction to the unusual proposition.
In “Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America,” historian Alexa Green explains the men’s relationship as clearly one of master and servant.” If the man wants to push a piece of mutton through your side, you let him. Other duties as assigned. (When St. Martin had healed sufficiently that the premise of providing continuing care began to seem a ruse, Beaumont provided a salary.) For two people so firmly distanced by class and employment structure, Beaumont and St. Martin inhabited a relationship that could be oddly, intensely intimate. “On applying the tongue to the mucous coat of the stomach, in its empty, unirritated state, no acid taste can be perceived.”* The one image I eventually found of Alexis St. Martin as a whole young man is in a painting by Dean Cornwell entitled Beaumont and St. Martin—part of the Pioneers of American Medicine series commissioned in 1938 by Wyeth Laboratories for an ad campaign. Despite the unfortunate side-parted bob that St. Martin appeared to stick with all through his adult life, the man as Cornwell rendered him is striking: broad cheekbones, vertically plunging aquiline nose, and a firmly muscled, deeply tanned chest and arms. Beaumont is dashing but dandified. His hair is oddly waved and piled, like something squeezed from a cake decorator’s bag.
Cornwell’s painting is set at Fort Crawford, in Michigan Territory, during St. Martin’s second stint in Beaumont’s employ, around 1830. At this stage in his digestive explorations, Beaumont had been trying to determine whether the gastric juice would work outside of the stomach, removed from the body’s “vital force.” (It does.) He filled vial after vial with St. Martin’s secretions and dropped in all manner of foods. The cabin became a kind of gastric-juice dairy. Beaumont, in the painting, holds one end of a length of gum elastic tubing in St. Martin’s stomach; the other end drips into a bottle in Beaumont’s lap.
I spent a good deal of time staring at this painting, trying to parse the relationship between the two. The gulf between their stations is clear. St. Martin wears dungarees worn through at the knees. Beaumont appears in full military dress—brass-buttoned jacket with gold epaulettes, piping-trimmed breeches tucked into knee-high leather boots. “True,” Cornwell seems to be saying, “it’s an unsavory situation for our man St. Martin, but look, just look, at the splendorous man he has the honor of serving.” (Presumably Cornwell took some liberties with the costuming in order to glorify his subject. Anyone who works with hydrochloric acid knows you don’t wear your dress clothes in the lab.) The emotions are hard to read. St. Martin appears neither happy nor aggrieved. He lies on his side, propped on an elbow. His posture and far-off stare suggest a man reclining by a campfire. Beaumont, admirably erect, sits in a buckskin chair by the bed. He stares into high middle distance, as though a TV set were mounted on the cabin wall. He looks like a hospital visitor who has run out of things to say. The prevailing mood of the painting is stoicism: one man enduring for the sake of science, the other for subsistence. Given the painting’s intent—the glorification of medicine (and Beaumont and Wyeth labs)—it’s fair to assume the emotional content has been given a whitewash. It can’t have been a hoot for either. At least once in his notes, Beaumont mentions St. Martin’s “anger and impatience.” The procedure was not merely tedious; it was physically unpleasant. The extraction of the gastric juices, Beaumont wrote, “is generally attended by that peculiar sensation at the pit of the stomach, termed sinking, with some degree of faintness, which renders it necessary to stop the operation.”