Alexis St. Martin

Work with Beaumont From Beaumont's Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, 1833 (p. 27) On June 6, 1822, St-Martin was accidentally shot by a musket fired from close range at the fur trading post on Mackinac Island. The musket shot left a wound in his side that developed into a fistula connecting his stomach to the outside of his body.

William Beaumont, a US Army surgeon stationed at a nearby army post, treated the wound. Although St-Martin was a healthy young man, he was not expected to recover due to the severity of his wound, which included a perforated stomach, lung injury, and rib fractures. Some of the experiments were reportedly painful to St-Martin. After placing sacks of food in the stomach, Beaumont noted "the boy complained of some pain and uneasiness at the breast." He would not reunite with Beaumont until 1829, at which point he was living in poverty near Montreal and willing to join Beaumont in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. As an army doctor, Beaumont was posted to the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1834. He became Professor of Surgery in the Medical Department of Saint Louis University in 1837 and resigned from the army in 1839. Repeatedly, Beaumont tried to get St-Martin to move to St. Louis, without success.

When Alexis St-Martin died at Saint-Thomas, Quebec, in 1880, his family delayed his burial until the body began to decompose in order to prevent his "resurrection" by medical men, some of whom wished to perform an autopsy or remove the stomach.

The eminent physician Sir William Osler took a great interest in retracing the details of this early incident in the history of gastric physiology and published his research in the form of a well-known essay entitled A Backwoods Physiologist.