Two hundred years ago — Thursday, June 6th, 1822 — Dr. William Beaumont saved the life of Alexis St. Martin. In the years to follow, Dr. Beaumont transformed the man he saved into a subject he exploited. I recently shared this strange story of unrestrained scientific ambition with BBC REEL.
The events are 200 years old, but the themes are very modern. “The curious case of the man with a hole in his stomach” (5-minute watch) is part of a series exploring the changing body. (My story begins after a one-minute introduction to the series).
What happened that Thursday morning in the American Fur Company’s supply store unleashed a decades-long relationship between these two very different men. It started when, at close range, a shotgun misfired, and the young French-Canadian fur trapper sustained a horrendous gunshot wound. The blast ripped open his chest and abdominal wall. Alexis’s breakfast spilled out. Dr. Beaumont used a pen knife to snip away fractured rib and repair a protruding lobe of lung the appearance, he wrote, of a turkey’s egg.
Twenty-eight years later, a desperate Dr. Beaumont wrote to St. Martin. He confessed his “most fervent desire to have you again with me. With me not only for my own individual gratification, and the benefits of medical science, but also for your own and your family’s present good and future welfare.”
Their story is of transformations, from doctor to scientist to entrepreneur, and from patient to subject. Charity and a desire to heal drove Dr. Beaumont but so too did insatiable ambition, insecurities and deep prejudices (he angrily and pejoratively described Alexis St. Martin as “fistulous Alexis”).
Please enjoy the BBC REEL documentary. You can also read my fictionalized account of this strange story of unrestrained scientific ambition in my novel, “Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont.”
— Jason Karlawish
Purchase “Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont” in paperback, hardback, and e-book.
“The relationship between doctor and patient is hard enough to parse when both are in the same room. ... And of the gallons of ink spilled over the centuries in attempts at clarification, few efforts in recent memory lay out the frustrations and confusions and crystalline moments of grace better than Dr. Jason Karlawish’s marvelous new book Open Wound.”
— The New York Times