Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  Beaumont regarded Alexis. “Why, why did you flee me in Mackinac?”

  Alexis shrugged. “To be free, I suppose.”

  Beaumont exhaled slowly through his nose. “That's absurd. I freed you of your indenture. We struck a deal in my office at the hospital. You do realize that if we had continued that work then in Mackinac, you and I now could have long returned from Paris, and be well settled now at one of the universities, and you with a good wage? We'd never have suffered the likes of Prairie du Chien.”

  Alexis faced squarely his doctor, his master and his commanding officer.

  “You yourself fled your father's farm so you could make it in the world. I tried that too. Though I failed, and now here I am back with you, my doctor, my savior. Mon dieu. Give me that much credit, please.”

  He held forth his right hand and rubbed the tips of its thumb and forefinger together.

  “And you know, I'm running low on money again. Just like you and your time.”

  PART 3

  The Immortal Part Cracked

  FORTY-TWO

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1833, Beaumont had only the light duty of examining army recruits at the Plattsburgh garrison. This granted him sufficient time for daily experiments on Alexis. It was time he urgently needed. He was determined to publish the book by the winter, with or without the results from the Swedish chemist. He had decided the public cared little about the chemical responsible for digestion. What they did desire was a thorough knowledge of how much time it took to digest Articles of Diet. He set to work to complete these tables with renewed zeal and ambition.

  He recorded the times it took to digest an encyclopedia of Articles of Diet: gelatin; rice; sage; soused pig's feet; fresh eggs; eggs boiled, fried, roasted and raw; salmon, trout, bass and catfish; pork; beef and mutton in states boiled, raw, fried and stewed; chicken soup; olive oil; parsnips; butter; cabbage with and without vinegar. He tested aliment via string into the stomach, in vials kept warm for hours beneath Alexis's axilla, and in the sand bath. He pressed on through the man's drunkenness, anger, a fever and an extreme case of indigestion. The ritual of these experiments became so regular that, around noon each day, the Beaumont children would sing out, Alexis where are you? Docteur Beaumont requires tu!

  In October, just after the harvest, he gathered Alexis and witnesses at Jonathan Woodward's office overlooking the Plattsburgh square.

  “I thought I'd never see the two of you again,” Woodward remarked. The ruddy-faced lawyer, lamed by a gouty foot, stayed behind his desk. “How was Paris?”

  “We kept to Washington City,” Beaumont replied.

  They struck a new covenant. This agreement covered two years duration, and Beaumont raised Alexis's annual fee to four hundred dollars, one-quarter of which he paid out in cash notes that very afternoon.

  Three days later, Alexis approached Beaumont at his desk. His face was swollen and red. A letter had come from Lower Canada. Samuel's wife, Alice, had read it to Alexis. A child was sick.

  Beaumont set down his pen. “Which one?”

  “Charles.”

  “The boy born that spring in Prairie du Chien?”

  Alexis shook his head. “That was Edouard.” He held forth the opened letter.

  Beaumont took it in hand and scanned it.

  “It's French, but never the mind. I see the names. I'm sorry.” He handed the page back to Alexis.

  Alexis folded it and slipped in into the pocket of his trousers.

  “Thank you, Doctor. Doctor, there's a boat leaving in the morn for Rouses Point.”

  Beaumont looked out the window at the bare trees. A coach was passing. Two laborers with pick and shovel had stopped to watch it.

  “Yes, of course, I suppose you must go. I had planned for you to join me in New York. The book will be published in a month or two. Now is the time to press hard for subscriptions, especially in the cities and other prominent venues. We'll also journey to Philadelphia. That's a splendid city. Quadrilled streets. Independence Hall. And the overland routes are swift and comfortable, even in winter. We'll perform demonstrations to the leading scientists and citizens. And then to Washington. I have a letter here from Edward Everett that several members of Congress will support a resolution to support further research. Having you there for the congressman to see would help to advance our case. Could you be back within a month?”

  “As soon as God permits.”

  “Permits what?”

  “Permits me to return. I have always trusted in God, Doctor. And now he holds the life of my son in his hands.”

  “God does?” He reached for a clean sheet of paper, dipped his pen and began writing. “Each of us has his duties. I'll grant you your leave, Sergeant.”

  He finished writing.

  “With the winds as they are on the lake, the journey to Rouses Point is a day, at most. And then a short trip up the Lacolle River and a carriage ride. Within another day you can be in Berthier. So one month should be sufficient. If circumstances change, you are to send word. Otherwise, I'll expect you by mid-December. You're under my orders, and you well know the consequences if you fail to return. Here you are, Sergeant.”

  He handed the order to Alexis.

  Alexis took the order, folded it without looking at it and slipped it into a pocket.

  “Remember, Alexis. Alexis, look at me. Remember the company. Mr. Crooks and his people. They'll be watching out for you as well.”

  BY DECEMBER, Beaumont was dejected. Alexis had not returned from Berthier, and his efforts in Washington to secure funds to pay for his years caring for Alexis and to support future experiments had failed.

  He had sat confidently in the gallery above the floor of the House of Representatives as he watched the clerk lazily announce the call for a vote on the Resolution to Support Doctor William Beaumont's Research upon the Stomach of Alexis St. Martin for the Betterment of American Science and Scientific Advancement. Congressman Everett had assured him the vote would be a mere formality. The scene that late afternoon was a dull monotony of passing papers, the low murmuring of many whispered conversations and idle scribbling, until a congressman sprang up from his seat and called out a question for the Speaker.

  “Was not this Alexander St. Martin a soldier when he was wounded, and therefore the army cannot rightly owe him compensation?”

  Several congressmen roused. A debate was soon ordered. A congress-man from New Hampshire objected to allocating public funds for private gain, and a shrill congressman from South Carolina declared that it seemed folly to re-reward this Dr. Beaumont when that man had been paid a salary for his service in the army. Several representatives took to reading the actual text of the resolution. A vote was called. The resolution failed. Congressman Everett urged Beaumont to rewrite the resolution so that it would be more easily digestible to Congress.

  In January, Francis Allen delivered a crate of copies of Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion to the cluttered parlor of Samuel Beaumont's house. Deborah held a copy with two hands and gazed upon it like some precious tablet, and then she set it down on the side table and embraced her husband.

  “It is done. I am so very proud of you, my husband, so very proud.”

  He started to speak, but a tightening in his chest kept him silent.

  “D'you remember that afternoon in June on Mackinac Island, in our little house, the cottage at the edge of the village, when I asked you how this would end? Do you? I can see that day all too well, like we were still there in that little room I called our parlor. Sarah with her doll. Me with my copy of Pamela. You had been working on your accounts at your table. I've long wanted to tell that I was so selfish to ask you that.”

  “Debbie, please Debbie, you shouldn't think such things. Put them out of your mind.”

  For both, the image of that afternoon was as vivid as the floor beneath his feet. For several moments neither spoke.

  “One thing I've learned, William, is that we really n
ever forget. The details shift and fade and change like so many shadows. Months pass, years really, when I don't think of my lonesome years married to Nathaniel, and even when I do think of him, I'm not so sure of the details.” She laughed. “You know I cannot accurately recall the color of his hair?

  “And yet, I know that those years are in me. I suppose that is why I always worried about your dedication to study Alexis and our years in Prairie du Chien and you going away with him. But now I am not worried. Because here it is, your book, and it shall be your new memory, and we are whole and a family. You are not only industrious as an ant but a strong, ordered and resolute man. I'm so proud of you.”

  She reached over to the table where the copy of the book rested and ran the tip of her index finger over the title, over her husband's name.

  “And I'm so sorry for how I behaved all these years, badgering you to resign the army, demanding to know when this all would be done. Can you forgive me?”

  “Debbie, my Debbie, stop. Stop,” he murmured. “Yours are always the proper concerns of any Christian wife and mother. Those years are over.”

  THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED were a succession of simple pleasures. They celebrated with a cake and apple brandy. The children performed a pantomime, and the Greens hosted a reading for the members of the Clinton County Medical Society and Plattsburgh's leading families. Beaumont's name was placed on the roll of public benefactors. He presented signed copies to Jonathan Woodward and the mayor, and the newly established lending library purchased three signed copies.

  Within two weeks, Beaumont grew restless. He rose before dawn. He became distracted at play with his children. There were hundreds of books to sell. Expenses to recover. A fortune to be made. He composed letters to accompany the special copies bound in sheepskin-covered board which he sent to the leaders of Washington. By the end of the month, he announced his plan to travel south to Washington City.

  Deborah twisted and untwisted her handkerchief around her hands. Her expression hardened.

  “But you only just returned,” she said. “Young Bud has just started to talk.”

  He continued packing his valise.

  “I must go,” he said simply.

  HE TRAVELED ALONE on storm-choked mud roads and icy dark waters. In those solitary and cold hours, he revised his petition to the leaders of Congress to fund a memorial to pay him for his “ten years of selfless dedication to scientific labors and for continued support to pursue this American resource.” He carried a letter signed by leaders of the American Physiological Society proposing to establish William Beaumont and his living experimental machine at their institute in Boston.

  By the spring, he went north through New England, from New Haven to New London, then to Groton and Rhode Island. He traveled to Boston and inland to a barracks at Worcester. He traveled on horseback with two pack horses for his belongings. He journeyed through mill towns, their massive factories populated with young women and boys from the country. The gray air smelled of steam and decay, and all about were the sounds of rotting lungs coughing like panicked geese. He exchanged quiet and quick greetings with farmers with land claims from the Crown, the borders marked by stone walls laid true and square with scarcely room to pass a blade between the stones. He passed children walking to school, the girls with their bonnets drawn low over their foreheads and their eyes cast down, the boys averting their gaze from him.

  On April 18th, he paused before an inn whose brick wall ran right to the edge of the sunken road. He was within just a few miles of Westerly, the town where his sister Lucretia had settled some eight or nine years ago. He rode on. He daydreamed of his father, saw the man at his ladder-backed chair before the kitchen table, the sinews of his lean forearms tense and bulging, heard him pronounce the book some kind of foolishness, an investment not worth the pages upon which it was printed. The price of how many meals wasted? His father told him that a hundred years from now men will still walk the length and width of our land that still bears our name but there shan't be a man who walks the earth who reads your book.

  Beaumont's order was to inspect hospitals, and his added mission was to promote and sell copies of Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice. He performed his duties with double diligence and zeal. His inspection reports sometimes ran to twenty or more handwritten pages with appendices. He counted the vials of medicines, tested the edge of the surgeon's blades and saws, calibrated the scales with a true set of weights, measured the distances between the cots, the arrangement of bandages, the distance from barracks to latrine. He insisted on seeing the weather log and compared the fort's barometer to the barometer he carried in a square box. And at every hospital, he cataloged the medical books, and he made his case to add to the collection a copy of Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, at a cost of three dollars.

  He traveled with a crate full of the books divided between the two pack horses. At the towns along his route, he solicited subscriptions from the booksellers and apothecaries, presenting them a broadsheet handbill—These experiments are submitted to the public with a confident hope that they will subserve the cause of science and medicine and ultimately become the means of ameliorating the condition of suffering humanity. At the forts he arranged with the surgeon to assemble leading citizens, officers and others of influence in the community to gather for a reading and discussion of the book about the man with the hole in his side. He showed the letters from Judge Isaac Platt, Vice President Martin Van Buren and Secretary Cass, as well as newspaper clippings of the book's reviews and promotionals.

  Beaumont had accumulated some thirty-eight reviews—Truly a work of most surpassing interest; will be read with utility and interest by all classes of every community... The march of knowledge is onward, its progress unceasing, its extent apparently boundless. Every pain and anguish further it. This work is one of general utility that appeals to and should receive the support of every class of readers. The St. Louis Republican claimed the book essential reading in these times of cholera. He carried forty-seven laudatory letters from physicians, congressmen and scientists, and a proclamation from the Connecticut Medical Society that certified him a member and proclaimed that the science of diet and dietetics had entered a New Dawn.

  But the book did not sell. The secretaries of the army and the navy, while effusive in their praise for it, declined to honor his appeal that each purchase one hundred copies to supply the libraries of their forts and ships. The English publisher Mr. Highly sent a curt note from his Fleet Street office: I have returned Beaumont's Experiments, as I do not feel inclined to make an offer for it.

  Disappointments multiplied. A letter dated five months earlier arrived from Sweden. My Dear Sir, I am very grateful for the confidence you have had in me in wishing to engage me in making an analysis of the gastric juice, and I regret deeply that for the following reasons, I am not able to answer your expectations. The reasons were many and their chronicle tedious, and the end of letter was a series of questions, each more exacting than the former, leading up to the desultory conclusion: You see, then, dear Sir, how much previous knowledge I need for entering upon this analysis of the gastric juice with hope of success. As ever, Professor Jacob Berzelius.

  Anonymous critics drew him into a simmering rage. Medicus wrote to the Washington Evening Star that Doctor Beaumont did not heal the wound. Does this display of such science and genius entitle the Doctor to a national remuneration by a special act of Congress? There is a fallacy in the whole business. Digestion is a chymical process and no two things are more different that a chymical process carried on in the presence and, again, in the absence of the atmospheric air. Far more satisfactory experiments have long since been made on the solvent power of that juice by feeding dogs various food.

  Others insisted the findings on the time to digest articles of diet were of little value because Beaumont had failed to record a detailed account of the quantity of food involved in the experiments or the dispositi
on and temperament of his digesting machine. Powerful vegetarians backed by Sylvester Graeme took issue with the claim that meat was easier to digest than vegetables. Though some vitalists conceded Beaumont had confirmed the chemical process of digestion, they regretted that Alexis had not been in the charge of a physician better qualified to prosecute experiments and thereby discover what the chemical was. They repeated Dr. Dunglison's words. The book was a kind of diary of digestion, no more than amateur science that lacked a systematized arrangement of the experiments, and they regretted the rigors of labor inflicted upon the man with the fistula, the excess of zeal to prove what a university-trained physiologist could have done with a few well-planned and carefully executed experiments.

  It was the review in the London Athanaeum that drove Beaumont to argue out loud with the page upon which it was printed. Perhaps science has benefited even by Doctor Beaumont's errors and a fraction of his many experiments, but the haste of his frontier zeal to experiment, however innocent and selfless was his intent, seems to have forgotten he was operating upon a living, irritable human stomach.