Studying the Stomach

In his awesome book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson says that for a very long time, almost everything we knew of the stomach was due to an unfortunate accident in 1822. A rifle being examined went off accidentally tearing a hole in the lower chest of a bystander, Alexis St Martin. While the man survived, the wound never healed giving him the “most famous stomach in medical history”.

 

His doctor, William Beaumont, realized the inch-wide hole gave him an “unusual window” into his patient’s insides and a “direct access to his stomach”. Back then, nobody knew what happened to food once it went down the throat. So Beaumont would suspend different foods on lengths of silken thread into St Martin’s stomach, leave them for different time periods, then “pulling them out to see what had happened”.

 

At times, in the interest of science (of course):

“(Beaumont) tasted the contents (of the extracted food) to judge their tartness and acidity, and by doing so deduced that the principle digestive agent of the stomach is hydrochloric acid.”

 

It reminded me of Hobbes’ line in the last panel of this strip: 


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