What misfortune led to an important discovery?

William Beaumont was a 19th-century American physician who became famous for discovering how human digestive processes occur.

The discovery, however, was almost fortuitous: in June 1822, Beaumont rescued a young gunshot victim named Alexis St. Martin who had a fist-sized hole in her stomach.

Thanks to Alexis Beaumont, he quantified in detail the different speeds of food digestion, and was the first to carry out "in vitro" digestion experiments by taking gastric juices from the stomach and studying how they function at different temperatures.

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Alexis's unique situation made it possible, simply by removing the protective bandages, to investigate digestive processes in detail as had never been possible before. Beaumont then offered the boy the opportunity to become his laboratory assistant, or more correctly his guinea pig, subjecting him to a series of sufficiently reproducible experiments.

Thanks to Beaumont's experience as a surgeon, Alexis managed to survive despite the fact that the shots left a considerable wound in his stomach that did not heal completely, turning into a fistula.

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Thanks to these studies, Beaumont was able to determine that food was digested by chemical action, which is why he is known as the "father of gastric physiology."

At the time, there was debate over whether the stomach digested food mechanically or chemically and Beaumont was able to solve that mystery by using a spoon to insert food into Saint Martin's stomach only to remove it and examine it. Beaumont also made observations, such as putting meat tied with string into the hole and then pulling it out.

Because of the discontinuous relationship with Alexis, due to the latter's impetuous temperament, Beaumont took many years to complete his research. Saint Martin left in 1825 and returned only four years later; however, he left again in 1831. The study book Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion was published in 1833.

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Beaumont performed more than 200 experiments on Saint Martin's body.