Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont
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I do not know whether Deborah Beaumont ever read or even knew of Samuel Richardson's eighteenth-century novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. And yet, two events moved me to have her read it: her letter to her absent husband who was still hoping to display Alexis in Paris—May you see all your wishes accomplished and be ready ere long to settle down quietly with your family, who all love you so much, is the prayer of your wife—and his entry in his medical notebook that condemned novels as “lovesick trash” and those who read them as seeking “enjoyment beneath the level of a rational being.” I wanted to grant her the virtue of caring about the character of Pamela Andrews, a servant girl who struggles to establish a fair and just relationship with her master. If there is to be justice in this world, it shall be made by people like Deborah Beaumont, who see the power that fiction gives to empathy.
THOSE ARE THE FACTS, MORE OR LESS. I want to offer a few remarks on how I made sense of them to create Open Wound. William Beaumont lived in an age that seems long past. His medical practice is perhaps the most notable example of this. He drew on a theory of disease popularized by the eighteenth-century Scottish physician John Brown in his text Elementa Medicinae. The Brunonian system built upon William Cullen's theory that the central cause of disease was either increased or decreased activity of the nervous system. Brown focused less on the nervous system and instead stressed that disease was the result of either over- or understimulation.
Diagnostics largely determined which of these two conditions caused the patient's symptoms, and what followed was an often brutal therapeutics. A typical entry in Beaumont's medical notebook reads, “When pneumonia symptoms must prevail, use the lancet early in the attack, epispastics and antimonials,” translated as treatment by bleeding, blistering, and vomiting.
In the context of these kinds of practices, it is easy to measure a far distance between ancient then and modern now, but the more I studied Beaumont and his times, and the more I wrote this story, both William Beaumont and his world became as immediate as present times. Both the facts and the story moved me from nostalgia and curiosity, to empathy.
Among my muses was William Faulkner's line “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” William Beaumont came of age when the United States of America had also entered its own young adulthood as a nation. Courtesy of the United States' lucky victory in the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars' exhaustion of the European powers' hunger for territory, we were free from foreign threats. The Louisiana Purchase gave the country ample territory for expansion. Although our Declaration of Independence asserted that all men are created equal and endowed with “unalienable rights,” women were disenfranchised, native populations were abused, and blacks were sold as property. William Beaumont was among those Americans who were free to grow up and “go ahead” as they desired, a phrase Americans used not just to describe a direction of travel, but to command action. In the context of this American Experiment, Dr. William Beaumont launched his own experiments.
When I began this project, I conceived of Beaumont as a kind of good man gone bad. I had the notion that he was a selfless doctor, a physician dedicated to each of his patients. And then he met Alexis and succumbed to temptation. A fallen angel. There is a bit of truth in this fable. I truly believe that, for a time, he was committed solely to caring for Alexis, and then he experienced a thunderclap of inspiration and recognized the opportunity and possibilities that Alexis's wound presented him.
The whole of William Beaumont is that since his youth, he was in a great hurry. The passion of ambition drove him to become a better man. On the morning of May 31, 1820, while going ahead via steamboat to Detroit on his way to Mackinac Island, a newspaper reprint of Benjamin Franklin's “project for attaining moral perfection” so inspired him that he copied Franklin's text word for word into his diary. He was yet another American determined to rise up from rags to riches and to consult a self-help book to assist him.
Alexis St. Martin did not tempt William Beaumont so much as serve as the unwitting bride whom Beaumont led to the altar of his ambition. Alexis fulfilled what Beaumont had desired since at least the age of twenty-one, when he left his family's hardscrabble farm in Lebanon, Connecticut, and traveled north to make his fortune as a shopkeeper on the Canadian border. Alexis was Beaumont's means to become a Great American. That Alexis was once his patient completes the tragedy of this American Experiment.
William Beaumont had faith in the rightness of his science, in progress through research and hard work, and in the justice of fair reward in return for hard work. His repeated petitions to the U.S. Congress for what we would today call “federal grant support” to study Alexis were not just to make money. He truly believed he deserved to make money and to be recognized for his hard work and for the value of what was his under the terms of his Articles of Agreement and Covenant.
I feel about Beaumont as I do about myself and others who work to advance our careers in free, democratic and capitalist countries that reward merit over status such as class or social rank. A direct line can be drawn between him and contemporary researchers who list patents among their scientific discoveries, spin off companies and report the multimillion-dollar tally of their grants with the same pride as when they report the results those grants produce. William Beaumont was a most modern American man.
And that is why I began the book at its end, so to speak, with the prologue that reproduces much of the text of Beaumont's 1850 letter begging Alexis to return to him. That letter was my thunderclap of inspiration. It presented me the question that kept me working on this story: what drove Beaumont to write this letter? I knew that in telling the story of his life I would find the answer to this question.
And what of Alexis? He died in 1880. His family, determined that his body would not be dissected or become a museum piece, let his corpse lie for several days until it began to decay, then buried him deep in an unmarked grave in the church yard of St. Thomas de Joliette. In 1962, the Canadian Physiological Society placed a bronze plaque near the site of the grave that commemorated Alexis St. Martin for his miraculous recovery and how, through his affliction, he served all humanity.
Jason Karlawish
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2011
SOURCES
“The American Fur Company and Chicago.” Transcribed by Candi Horton for the Genealogy Trails History Group. 2006. http://www.genealogytrails.com.
Beaumont Collection. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Beaumont Collection. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Beaumont, William. Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. Facsimile of the original 1883 edition, together with the biographical essay “William Beaumont: A Pioneer American Physiologist,” by Sir William Osler. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996.
Cooke, Philip St. George. Scenes and Adventures in the Army; or, Romance of Military Life. 1856.
Horsman, Reginald. Frontier Doctor: William Beaumont, America's First Great Medical Scientist. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
Hurlbut, Henry H. Chicago Antiquities: Comprising Original Items and Relations, Letters, Extracts, and Notes Pertaining to Early Chicago, Embellished with Views, Portraits, Autographs, etc. Chicago, 1881.
Mahan, Bruce E. Old Fort Crawford and the Frontier. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1926.
Major, Ralph H. A History of Medicine, volume 2. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1954.
Meyer, Jesse S. Life and Letters of Dr. William Beaumont. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby Company, 1981.
Miller, Genevieve. William Beaumont's Formative Years: Two Early Notebooks, 1811–1821. New York, 1946. Reprinted in I. Bernard Cohen, ed., The Career of William Beaumont and the Reception of His Discovery. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home 1760–1860. New Haven: Yale New Haven Press, 1993.
Pilcher, James Exelyn
. The Surgeon Generals of the Army of the United States of America. A series of biographical sketches of the senior officers of the military medical service from the American Revolution to the Philippine pacification. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Association of Military Surgeons, 1905.
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers: With Brief Notices of Passing Events, Facts, and Opinions, A.D. 1812 to A.D. 1842.
van Ravensway, Charles. Saint Louis. An Informal History of the City and Its People, 1764–1865. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1991.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THERE ARE MANY, MANY PEOPLE I MUST THANK.
For assistance with research, Kristin Harkins, Jonathan Rubright, Faye Silag, and Elizabeth Sullo.
For reading, rereading, and sometimes reading yet again, sections and even entire drafts, Hewett Ashbridge, David Casarett, Sam Garner, Geoff Isenman, Bryan James, Richard Kaplan, Ken Katz, Selby Lighthill, Michael McCally, Jon Merz, Clarence Lee Moore, and Pamela Sankar. You all made me tell the story. Scott Kim, your command to “kill my baby” was critical.
For editing, I salute James Beaver, Ellen McCarthy, and Ann Patty. Special thanks to Ellen and all her colleagues at University of Michigan Press—especially, Scott Ham, Heather Newman, and Christina Milton—who championed this book's journey to print.
I salute my agent Ryan Harbage. His patience, integrity, and talent are peerless.
Peter Reese, you are il miglior fabbro.
Finally, for John Bruza I give praise and thanks that can be neither qualified nor bounded.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JASON KARLAWISH is a Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont is his first novel. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
jasonkarlawish.com