William Beaumont. Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion. 1833.

Beaumont, William, 1785-1853.

Lane Catalog Record

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William Beaumont's Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion (1833) records the first great original medical research conducted on the remote American frontier. An army surgeon serving at Fort Mackinac, Michigan, near the Canadian border, Beaumont recognized the unique opportunity offered him in the person of the young French Canadian voyageur Alexis St. Martin, who had been left with a permanent gastric fistula after a gunshot wound to the stomach, and became the first to make an accurate scientific study of the physical phenomena of gastric digestion. Beaumont's Experiments and Observations, conducted over a period of eight years, established the presence and role of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, the temperature of the stomach during digestion, the movement of the stomach walls and the relative digestibility of certain foods -- all of which revolutionized current theories of the physiology of digestion.

According to the publisher's preface to the second edition (1847), the first edition consisted of 3,000 copies, an unusually large number for an early American medical treatise. However, in a letter to the Surgeon-General dated 3 December 1833, Beaumont referred to an edition of 1,000 copies. 500 copies of the first edition were issued with a cancel title dated 1834, bearing the imprint of the Boston firm of Lilly, Wait & Co. The Lane Library copy is of the original 1833 edition.

—J. Norman, 2006

William Beaumont. Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion. 1833. Title page.

William Beaumont. Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion. 1833. Table of contents.