Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

to assume the emotional content has been given a whitewash. It can’t have been a hoot for either. At least once in his notes, Beaumont mentions St. Martin’s “anger and impatience.” The procedure was not merely tedious; it was physically unpleasant. The extraction of the gastric juices, Beaumont wrote, “is generally attended by that peculiar sensation at the pit of the stomach, termed sinking, with some degree of faintness, which renders it necessary to stop the operation.”
    The disrespect displayed by Beaumont and the medical establishment—evident in their correspondences about St. Martin—can’t have helped. St. Martin was referred to as “the boy” well into his thirties. He was “the human test tube,” “your patent digester.” For the out-of-body digestion experiments, Beaumont had St. Martin hold vials of gastric juice under his arms to simulate the temperature and movements of the stomach. “Kept in the axilla and frequently agitated for one hour and half,” Beaumont’s notes read. If you’d never heard the term axilla , you’d think it was a piece of laboratory equipment, not a French Canadian’s underarm. Beaumont carried out dozens of experiments that required St. Martin to hold vials this way for six, eight, eleven, even twenty-four (corn kernel!) hours. Not surprisingly, St. Martin twice quit—“absconded,” as Beaumont termed it—partly to see his family in Canada, but also because he’d had enough. Only the second time did he do so in violation of a signed contract, and for this he earned Beaumont’s lasting ire. In a letter to the U.S. surgeon general composed around that time, Beaumont deplores St. Martin’s “villainous obstinacy and ugliness.”
    But Beaumont had no other fistulous stomach to turn to. Though he’d finished his experiments, he needed St. Martin to bolster his status overseas. Late in his career, he’d come to know a group of scientists in Europe—chemists and others to whom he’d shipped * bottles of gastric juice for analysis. (His correspondence from that period is a mix of ghoulishness and high manners. “I thank you very much for your Bottle of the gastric fluid.” “I have . . . with peculiar pleasure experimented upon the masticated meat . . . , as suggested in your last letter.”) Though none of these men successfully identified the various “juices,” one had invited him to lecture in Europe, with St. Martin along as a kind of human PowerPoint.
    What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company who had located St. Martin and tried to broker a return. It was a seller’s market with a fevered buyer. With each new round of communications—St. Martin holding out for more or making excuses, though always politely and with “love to your family”—Beaumont raised his offer: $250 a year, with an additional $50 to relocate the wife and five children (“his live stock,” as Beaumont at one point refers to them). Perhaps a government pension and a piece of land? His final plan was to offer St. Martin $500 a year if he’d leave his family behind, at which point Beaumont planned to unfurl some unspecified trickery: “When I get him alone again into my keeping I will take good care to control him as I please.” But St. Martin— beep, beep! —eluded his grasp.
    In the end, Beaumont died first. When a colleague, years later, set out to bag the fabled stomach for study and museum display, St. Martin’s survivors sent a cable that must have given pause to the telegraph operator: “Don’t come for autopsy, will be killed.”
    B Y TODAY’S STANDARDS of political correctness, William Beaumont had an unattractive sense of entitlement and superiority. I don’t see this as a product of flawed morals. After all, this is a man who claimed, in his diary, to be following Benjamin Franklin’s “plan for