Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  Callers came to see the man with the hole in his side: several physicians in the surgeon general corps; Dr. Henry Hunt, President Jackson's physician; three professors from Columbia Medical College; a Very Right Reverend of the Episcopal Church and close friend of Lovell's; a reporter from the National Intelligencer.

  By the end of the third week, Beaumont had recorded thirty experiments in his notebook and had set upon the mantelpiece a tidy stack of two dozen calling cards, along with an invitation to a reception for a recently appointed undersecretary of the navy, another for a tea hosted by the wife of General Scott, and the most cherished—President Andrew Jackson's Christmas Ball.

  THE JAM OF CARRIAGES AND GIGS lined Pennsylvania Avenue a mile from the White House. Many guests decided to simply leave their vehicles and walk the distance, passing a detachment of marines with bayonets fixed. They'd been called out to maintain order among the rowdy crowds of laborers and hangers-on who had come up from the Georgetown docklands and swirled like a horde of insects in the feeble yellow glow of the oil lamps lining the fog-blanketed length of Pennsylvania Avenue. A fight nearly broke out between a group of laborers and another of free Negroes. The air smelled of the grease of cooking fires. An elderly man paused to wipe the mist from his spectacles. Crowds gathered on the White House lawn, passing bottles, singing Irish carols and demanding, and in due course receiving, their fair share of the party. This was not simply a Christmas celebration but also a celebration of the reelection of President Andrew Jackson and his new vice president, Martin Van Buren.

  Inside the ballroom, the string and brass band created a general din that amplified the noise of the crowd so that many had to shout to be heard. The heat grew oppressive; red-faced men unloosened their cravats and flapped their jackets like great flightless birds; the ladies smartly fanned themselves and dabbed their powdered brows. The servants threw open the doors and windows.

  The ostentatiously victorious Southern Democrats slapped each other's backs, journalists and judges wandered everywhere, and a few dour Northern Whigs sullenly sipped punch. News and gossip were heard everywhere.

  “Will the Negro rise up?”

  “Wasn't the Thorntons' ball grand?”

  “Calhoun is finished.”

  “They no longer serve the best turtle soup at the Epicurean Eating House.”

  “Look at the poonts on that girl.”

  There were diplomats in formal dress with the emblems of their nation's high honors and ceremonial swords with gold-braided hilts and silver scabbards, officers with chests thick with colored medals and crossed by crimson sashes. Children ran about with candy sticks and small white frosted cakes topped with yellow raisins. Some discovered that in stocking feet they could slide along the dance floor as if it were a winter pond. The servants carried in buckets to replenish the punch bowls, set silver platters piled with cakes and sandwiches on a table as long as a carriage. Young men lurked near the mistletoe.

  Despite this activity there was a distinct sense of power in the room, centered on President and General Andrew Jackson. Jackson was dressed in black and buttoned high to the Adam's apple, like a parody of a severe Northern Whig or Unitarian minister, his golden hair swept back, pomaded and combed smooth, as if burnished by the glow of his victory. He stood beside a conifer twice his height which was decorated by tiny white candles and red ribbons. The pace of the receiving line to greet the president was so slow that people cut in and out of the line. After one hour of gradually advancing, Dr. William Beaumont stepped forward to shake the hand not of the Hero of New Orleans but of his vice president, the Little Magician, Martin Van Buren. The man was stiff and short as a stump.

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Vice President.”

  “Merry Christmas to you too, sir.”

  The vice president scanned the symbols of Beaumont's dress uniform, nodded at the caduceus and praised him for his service to the surgeons corps.

  “Surgeon General Lovell is a most able officer,” he declared.

  “Yes indeed he is, Mr. Vice President, and a great friend and colleague as well. We've known each other since the War of 1812. I expect he is somewhere among this gathering. You know, Mr. Vice President, you and I share a bond as fellow New Yorkers. You from Kinderhook and I from Plattsburgh. I'm William Beaumont, surgeon in the corps.”

  “A fine city in a great state. Do you know my good friend Francis Woodward?”

  Beaumont nodded vigorously. “A good man.”

  “Such a pleasure, Doctor. Do let my secretary know if there is anything I can do to assure the success and comfort of your stay in our capital. I take special care of my fellow New Yorkers. Governor Throop, himself, he is somewhere among us.”

  Beaumont produced one of his newly printed calling cards.

  “I have the honor to be stationed at the Naval Yard under Surgeon General Lovell's command to complete a study of digestion upon a patient I've cared for, for some ten years now. Dr. Lovell and I anticipate that the results shall be most informative for the health of all Americans. Dietetics is essential to a robust constitution.”

  Van Buren nodded solemnly as he pocketed the card and offered Beaumont one of his own.

  “Most interesting. Progress in science is, as in commerce, essential to the success of our great American experiment.”

  Beaumont let the flow of the receiving line carry him away from the vice president. He could scarcely contain his thrill. He downed a cup of sweet punch in one gulp, stepped into the chill of the evening and loosened his collar as he gazed at Van Buren's calling card. The card of the vice president of the United States of America was his. Men such as this could see in this son of a failed Yankee farmer the promise of America's progress along a new frontier.

  Several guests mistook Beaumont in his dress uniform for an army officer and asked him about the great chief Blackhawk and the war that bore his name. When they discovered that he was a medical officer, some retreated to refill their punch glasses, others told tales of their fevers, aches, and pains. A few asked about the purpose of his stay in Washington. In time, he fell into lecturing to a group of seven guests.

  “Spices, alcohol, none of these things are digested and thus possess no nutritive properties. They simply pass out of the stomach and into the circulatory system, surely to do harm elsewhere. You see, they don't coagulate, so there is no way that the gastric juice can act upon them. But milk. Milk is, I tell you, the ideal substance for digestion; it readily coagulates upon mixing with the gastric juice. There should be sufficient cows in every fort and garrison.”

  Several of the company gathered before him gazed at their punch glasses. Two men, dressed in the high style with striped trousers buttoned high to the waist and colorful frock coats, clinked their cups and drained them.

  The young man in a salad green jacket leaned forward. “And what of cheese?”

  Beaumont shook his head.

  “One might think so, sir, but consider its closeness of texture and its large portion of fat. Both are not readily amenable to easy action of the gastric juice. Thorough mastication is essential. Absolutely essential.”

  “Mastication,” the young man repeated.

  An elderly man with a puckered face turned en bloc to a frail woman who stood beside him.

  “Did you hear that, Emily? Cheese is not proper for the diet. Perhaps we should talk with Bessie? She's our cook,” he said to Beaumont. “A very capable Negress. Cheese is often served at our table.”

  Two ample-bosomed ladies who stood in the periphery blushed and hid their smiles behind the needlepoint-ornamented crests of their silken fans.

  FORTY

  AFTER THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS OF CONTINUOUS EXPERIMENTS and observations upon Alexis, as Beaumont was recording experiment number fifty-seven, Dr. Lovell called with a visitor, a slender man whose curly red hair was cut close like that of a Roman senator, his cheeks flush from the cold. His frock coat was the customary gentlemen's black, but its details displayed signs of wealth. Gold button
s, a silk lining. Lovell introduced the man.

  “This is a surprise, I know, William. But I have the honor of introducing Dr. and Professor Robley Dunglison from the University of Virginia. Gentlemen.”

  Robley Dunglison was personal physician to Thomas Jefferson, a physiologist and author of Human Physiology.

  “Dr. William Beaumont,” he said as he extended his hand. He was an Englishman. “Joseph wrote to me some months back that you were to be in Washington City. It is an honor now to stand here in your laboratory.”

  Beaumont stammered.

  “The honor, the honor is, sir, rather mine.”

  “It's mutual, then. You must pardon my calling without proper invitation, but I had reason to be in the city, and until the frosty weather of the last week, the muddy roads from Charlottesville gave little hope for swift passage until spring. When they froze, I simply decided to travel with all haste to Washington.”

  Dunglison surveyed the cluttered room.

  “You've assembled a most handsome laboratory here. Truly.”

  Lovell spoke up. “William, as you know, Dr. Dunglison is one of the principal proponents of the theory of digestion as a chemical process. His work in this area is most thoughtful.”

  “Here, here,” Beaumont interjected.

  “Robley, I should note that it was an error by the editor of the Medical Recorder that my name is ascribed to those four experiments. The credit is entirely William's.”

  “Of course,” Dunglison said. “I had every intent to reference the work in the first edition of Human Physiology, but the journal was mislaid and I could not refer to it in time. A deadline loomed. Publishers are like wives when their minds are made up.”

  The three men chuckled.

  “But I vividly recollect the results. They confirmed the experiments Spallanzani made at l'hôpital de la charité on a female with a fistulous opening into the stomach.”

  He gazed over to the worktable with its ordered arrangement of vials of gastric juice, the sand baths and notebooks.

  “I see that since your first experiment you have doubtless instituted others.”

  Beaumont stepped over to the table and took up one of the vials containing clear juice. He held it up before them like some jewel and turned it so it refracted the light of a sunbeam.

  “Herein, Doctor, is the gastric liquor. I distilled this some two weeks ago. It is as it was when it first flowed from the cavity. Observe.”

  He removed the cork and passed the vial before his nose, agitated it a bit and waved the flat of his free hand to encourage the odor to his nose, then touched the tip of his pinky into the fluid and onto his tongue. He handed the vial to Dunglison, who repeated these same maneuvers, then to Lovell. The three men were like dedicated oenophiles sampling a new vintage. When Dunglison tasted the liquid, he winced.

  “It is most certainly acidic.”

  “And entirely free of putrefaction,” Beaumont insisted. “I've a vial I've kept since my first experiments in Mackinac, and it remains as this one. Clear, free of putrefaction and acidulous in taste. And look here.”

  He took up another vial. It had a nut brown sediment at its bottom.

  “You see here. Three ounces of broiled breast of mutton, four ounces of wheat and corn bread. It has been in here since the 26th of December.”

  He looked closer at the label. “No, forgive me. Experiment number twenty-eight. Just one moment.”

  He set the vial down, put on his spectacles and consulted his notebook.

  “Number 28! Experiment number 28. That's December the 27th. Not the 26th. You'll see, as in all others the sediment that remains is entirely without evidence of putrefaction. Please.”

  Beaumont passed the vial to Dunglison, who uncorked it and performed the same maneuvers as he had with the first.

  “Perhaps less acidulous.”

  “Precisely. The chemical nature exhausts itself, but the addition of more fresh liquor readily recommences digestion. There clearly is a proper ratio of aliment to gastric liquor. You see the origins of indigestion when too much aliment, especially aliment that is not properly masticated, passes too quickly into the cavity.”

  Lovell nodded. Dunglison simply gazed at the vial.

  “So have you proven that saliva is not the sole agent in digestion as Montegre supposes but merely an adjuvant?”

  “Montegre is plainly mistaken,” Beaumont insisted.

  “He is,” said Dunglison. “Might I see this French boy of yours?”

  “Of course.” Beaumont stepped over to the door to Alexis's bedchamber. “Alexis,” he called.

  “Is he here?” Lovell asked.

  “He's here. He naps frequently. But now he's due for an inspection of the cavity. This morning he dined on fatty pork and bread, though I should expect by now the cavity is entirely empty.”

  Beaumont rapped a knuckle on the door.

  “Alexis, we have a visitor.” He swung open the door. “Alexis, a doctor from Virginia is here. Dr. Robley Dunglison.”

  “Une moment.” There was the sound of a bedframe creaking.

  “English, Alexis,” Beaumont muttered as he turned from the door. “Grant him a minute to awaken.”

  WITHIN AN HOUR, Alexis lay shirtless on a table. They had moved his pallet out into the sitting room that doubled for Beaumont's laboratory as there was not sufficient room for all four men in Alexis's narrow bedchamber. The coal fire was low but the room still dry and warm, and the three doctors had their shirtsleeves rolled up above their elbows. Dunglison's spectacles had slipped to the tip of his thin nose. The pleasantries and courtesies of the morning had long vanished. The issue was the influence of the muslin bag on the course of digestion.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Dunglison repeated. “I take your point, Dr. Beaumont. I do. I do. But enough about the muslin bag.”

  Dunglison had a manner of noting a point by gesturing with his left pinky like some miniature wand, touching it to his chin, pointing, and that skinny digit was decorated with a thin ring of gold that held the Dunglison family crest. His accent had become sharper. He leaned over and took up the notebook, turning the pages as he spoke.

  “What precisely is your hypothesis?”

  “My hypothesis?”

  “Yes, hypothesis. What you set out to prove.”

  Beaumont stiffened.

  “That digestion is a chemical process. That it is not accomplished by putrefaction and grinding but a chemical process. That is my hypothesis.”

  Dunglison turned several pages of the notes. He looked at Beaumont over the rims of his spectacles. “You have proven it. You proved it even with your few experiments in Mackinac many years ago. That, sir, is brilliant. Brilliant.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Beaumont's voice was hardened.

  “My appeal to you is that you pursue observations by means of rigorous hypothesis testing, and, I might also add, it would be of value to standardize your methods as much as possible. It is all very well to say that digestion is a chemical process, but even better to say what that chemical is. I take it you're new to science, in particular to chemistry. Most days, if not all, you have the coffee measured out—a pint, I see—I assume he took it without any milk or sugar? And yet the bread, the toast, the butter, the sausages, none of them are measured or weighed. Hence your observations of the ratio of aliment to gastric liquor are not as sound as they might be. As a kind of diary of digestion this is most useful—I had a great-aunt in Sussex who kept such a thing, hers was of course cruder in its way—and yet I think that if you're to subject a man to daily inspections, multiple times in a day, you ought at least to have clear standards in your methods.”

  Dunglison exhaled heavily. He looked over at Alexis and then leaned in closer to Beaumont. He lowered his voice. “With all due respect, Doctor, it would balance the sacrifice you've subjected your lad to, I should think. There's just so much you can expect the man to take. There has to be some rational end to this work. I'm most willing to offer you some
guidance in these matters.”

  Beaumont swallowed hard.

  “I do most value your suggestions. I'm just a humble inquirer after the truth, of course, with neither the training nor position of a scientist such as yourself. Much like any explorer in a new land, I trust in my own eyes and ears and taste. To speak plainly, sir, and with all respect due to a man of your scientific stature and education, I think that the shackles of theory have been just that upon the field of physiology.”