Dr. William Beaumont
Doctor William Beaumont By C. J. Armstrong, M.D. Professor of Plastic surgery University of Louisville School of Medicine 1929 Some of the brightest lights of American medicine and surgery have been backwoodsmen. Ephraim McDowell, who did his wonderful operation of ovariotomy, was a backwoods practitioner. Marion Sims, who did so much to establish the science of surgery on this continent, and came to be the leading surgeon of his day, was doing his epoch making work “far form the maddening crowd.” So too, William Beaumont, another backwoodsman, was the pioneer physiologist of this country and the first to make a contribution of enduring value. William Hunter, the brilliant physician of the eighteenth century, brother of the immortal John Hunter, when lecturing to some students one day make this oft quoted remark, “Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill, others, that its it a fermenting vat, others again, that it is a stew pan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting vat nor a stew pan; but a stomach, gentlemen, a stomach.” It is the purpose of this sketch to discuss in brief fashion, the life an labors of the pioneer American physiologist, William Beaumont, whose work proved conclusively that the stomach is “neither a mill, a fermenting vat nor a stew-pan; but a stomach, gentlemen, a stomach.” William Beaumont, the third child of Samuel, was born November 21, 1785 in Lebanon, Connecticut, a few years after the close of the Revolutionary War. His father was a frugal, thrifty New England farmer who ploughed his land with wooden plow drawn by oxen, sowed his grain by hand, cut it with a scythe and threshed out the grain with a flail.
[Show full text]