Inquisitive doctor, reluctant patient: the story of Alexis St. Martin's gastric fistula and America's first physiologist, Dr. William Beaumont, who discovered gastric juice and the physiology of digestion (1822–1833; video shown by permission of the Mackinac Island State Park Commission)

On June 6, 1822, inside the American Fur Company's store on Mackinac Island, epicenter for the fur trading enterprise in the Great Lakes region, a French Canadian voyageur named Alexis St. Martin (1794–1880) was accidently shot in the stomach. Dr. William Beaumont (1785–1853), Post‐Surgeon at Fort Mackinac (1820–1825), attended to St. Martin's injuries over the next 3 years, but his stomach wound never closed resulting in a permanent gastric fistula. Recognizing a serendipitous opportunity to study digestion, the doctor began tying small bits of food to string and lowering them through the fistula into St. Martin's stomach, recording how long it took to digest the food. Beaumont conducted 238 experiments intermittently over 8 years at Fort Mackinac, MI (1825); Fort Niagara, NY (1825); Fort Crawford, WI (1829–31), and Washington D.C. (1832–33). In 1833 he published his discoveries in “Experiments and observations on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion”. Beaumont's pioneering studies established the field of digestive physiology, identifying HCl as the important element in gastric juice along with 50 other conclusions from his experiments (5.5 min video will be shown) (USF).