Can a person survive being shot in the stomach? If I told you that there was a man who, at the age of 20, was shot in the abdomen at close range by a rifle and left a large hole in the stomach, but the big hole existed for 58 years, and he miraculously lived to the age of 78, with more than 200 human experiments in between, can you believe it?
Why conduct human experiments on him? How did his body withstand it?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > St. Martin, who was shot in the abdomen but miraculously survived</h1>
Even more bizarre is the fact that this happened in the 17th century, when medical and sanitary conditions were very underdeveloped. In 1822, a Canadian navigator named Alexis St-Martin took the company's ship to Mackinaw Island (in Michigan, USA) as usual to trade furs.
When he arrived at the fur trading post, he stood at the door ready to deliver the goods, but about 2 to 3 feet away from him, there was a man with a shotgun that was reloading, but the man accidentally pulled the trigger. St. Martin was hit by the charge generated by the shotgun, leaving an egg-sized hole in the left side of his abdomen. The muscles near the opening of the cave were blown to pieces, several ribs were broken, and an opening was left in his stomach.
Young Saint Martin
William Beaumont, a U.S. Army surgeon stationed nearby, heard the news and rushed to treat St. Martin. Beaumont felt that the situation at Saint-Martin was not optimistic, and told those present that this person did not live more than 36 hours, even though he was only 20 years old and in good physical condition, but such a large wound was problematic to heal.
But St. Martin is not dead, his skin and ribs are slowly recovering, but the situation in his stomach is not optimistic. As the wound heals itself, the edge of the hole in the stomach slowly grows together with the edge of the hole in the skin, forming a permanent stomach fistula. At first, the food that St. Martin ate flowed into the stomach fistula, and after 17 days of recovery, the food began to remain in the stomach and the intestines began to restore digestive function.
A gastric fistula is an irrational communication that occurs between the stomach and neighboring organs or abdominal walls. Gastric fistula is divided into external fistula and internal fistula, the stomach cavity and body surface are the same as the extragastric fistula, st. Martin's case is extragastric fistula.
Epigastric fistula in St. Martin's body
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="42" > Saint Martin was a patient, servant, and guinea pig in Beaumont</h1>
In the 17th century, medical treatment was not developed, the first anesthesia had not yet been published, and antibiotics were even more fantastic, such injuries were already torture for Saint-Martin, but Beaumont found research value in him.
The external fistula of the stomach formed on St. Martin's body was able to see the inside of the stomach through it. Beaumont also felt that Saint-Martin could not survive this catastrophe, so he wanted to "make the best use of people" and use Saint-Martin to do live experiments, mainly through him to observe the digestive process of the stomach.
Human experiments in Beaumont and Saint-Martin
In August 1825, because Saint-Martin was largely disabled after the accident, he lost his job in a fur trading company, and he was illiterate. On the pretext that St. Martin was asked to be his domestic servant, Beaumont signed a master-servant contract with him and took him to his home in Fort Niagara, New York.
In this way, Saint-Martin had to work as a handyman in Beaumont during the day, chopping wood and carrying, and became his "guinea pig" at night.
In order to more intuitively observe the digestion of food in the stomach, Beaumont does not let Saint Martin carry out the normal chewing-digestion process, but through the stomach fistula window, the food is hung up with a thin rope, directly from the hole into St. Martin's stomach, and the food is taken out every few hours to observe the level of food digestion at different times. He also took a sample of stomach acid directly from St. Martin's stomach for compositional analysis.
Beaumont and Saint-Martin
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" > will st. Martin be painful? </h1>
The answer is yes. St. Martin often feels pain in the abdomen and chest, and the upper abdominal fossa also feels heavy and painful. The intense pain also made him feel a slight dizziness and blurred vision.
In this way, although Saint-Martin was not directly killed by the rifle, he survived under the "clutches" of Beaumont for 8 years, and he completed as many as 238 experiments on him.
Although illiterate, St. Martin's body could not continue to endure such torture, and during these 8 years, he escaped more than once, even back to his hometown of Canada. But all of them, without exception, were captured by the armed forces of Beaumont and continued to do experiments, because they signed a servant agreement, and Saint-Martin had to obey Beaumont's arrangement.
Beaumont was experimenting with St. Martin
Beaumont even used his connections to bring St. Martin's wife and two children to Fort Niagara. By 1833, Saint-Martin finally couldn't bear the pain and returned to Canada with his wife and children. Because he assured Beaumont that he could wait at any time in the future if needed, and he was able to return home after countless requests.
In order not to delay the progress of the research too much, Beaumont informed Saint-Martin in 1834 to return to continue the experiment, but Saint-Martin directly refused. Later, Beaumont was transferred to Camp St. Louis, Missouri to continue as a medic, and there was no time to continue pestering St. Martin.
(It is also said that St. Martin was able to endure for 8 years mainly because Beaumont saved his life and he wanted to repay the favor.) ）
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="44" > the amazing work of gastric physiology</h1>
After Saint-Martin left, Beaumont began to organize the research notes left over the past 8 years and consolidated all the observations and conclusions into a book called Experiments and Observations of Gastric Juice and Digestive Physiology. Published in 1838, the book shocked the entire medical community.
Beaumont's research notes
Beaumont makes an unprecedented point in the book, where he discovers that food is digested with the help of gastric juices after entering the stomach. And gastric juice will be digested into micronutrients suitable for the stomach after digestion to help the body absorb.
Simply put, before this, people thought that digestion was a physical squeeze, impact process, and after that, he proved that digestion is a chemical process.
Some of the conclusions we now take for granted are also derived from this cruel experiment, such as vegetables digesting more slowly than meat.
In 1839, Beaumont resigned from the army, and after these achievements, he became even more unconvinced of St. Martin, the perfect subject of experimentation, and he tried to get St. Martin to move to St. Louis to "cooperate" with him again, but all touched a nose of ash.
Beaumont
After reading the results of beaumont's research, many medical scientists and physiologists have taken a fancy to the value of Saint-Martin and want to invite him to cooperate with the experiment. But St. Martin himself and his family were resistant and just wanted him to live a normal life.
In 1880, Saint Martin died in his hometown, and many people offered to buy Saint Martin's body for autopsy experiments, but his family was reluctant. In order to avoid the theft of the body after the burial, they put St. Martin's body after decaying before burial, and the grave did not dare to erect a tombstone until 1962, when his granddaughter revealed the location of the grave.
Left: St. Martin's wife Right: St. Martin
The first half of St. Martin's life was miserable, his body could not be controlled in his own hands, and he endured suffering that ordinary people could not imagine. But it has to be said that his sacrifice benefited all mankind. Beaumont, who changed St. Martin's life and the course of gastric physiology research, died 27 years before St. Martin.
Today, the museum of Fort McNockie still preserves wax figures of Saint-Martin and Beaumont, and Beaumont's book is widely available in university libraries around the world, although it is not a bestseller, but it is an important masterpiece in the history of human medical research.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="45" > inspired "bovine rumen windowing."</h1>
After this, biologists and agronomists were inspired by the "St. Martin fistula" experiment and also began experiments on cattle. Because cows and beef cows often skip grass for no reason, are emaciated, and have low survival rates, researchers have opened windows where the rumen of cattle is located, and want to observe the digestion of cattle.
Bovine rumen windowing surgery
They found that the cow was abnormal because of digestive obstruction between its four stomach chambers. When they take out a portion of the hay deposited in the rumen, the cattle quickly regain their vitality. After that, a professional "rumen windowing surgery" was gradually derived.
After the rumen is windowed, there is no need to wait for the cow to grow an external gastric fistula on its own, but to install an artificial fistula device on the body of the cow, and then seal it with a glass cover, which is convenient for daily observation and convenient for opening the fistula at any time to help the cow digest. But even though the procedure is decades old, it is still unacceptable, and animal protectors often protest.
Nowadays, we do not need to dwell on moral and ethical issues, modern medicine is not yet so developed, without the dedication of these people, we may experience more suffering after illness. In the same way, excessive condemnation of doctors like Beaumont can hinder the progress of medical technology. After all, humanity still needs to conquer cancer and AIDS, and if there are not so many warriors and testers, then everything can only be empty talk.