Читать книгу The Little Book of Medical Breakthroughs - Dr. Naomi Craft - Страница 25

The liquid produced by the stomach is an acid and digestion is a chemical process.

Beaumont’s work challenged the previously held view that the fluid found in the stomach was like water.

William Beaumont was a surgeon working in the United States army in the 19th century. In 1822 he looked after a young man who had been shot in the stomach, leaving a gaping wound. Beaumont covered the wound with a metal plate and, although the hole never healed, the man recovered sufficiently to marry and to have four children of his own.

In the years that followed, Beaumont conducted many experiments on his patient to investigate the appearance and properties of the digestive fluid. He introduced various bits of food tied to a silk string into the stomach via the hole, and then retrieving them to see the effects. As a result of these observations, he concluded that the digestive process was a chemical process of dissolving the food, rather than squashing or macerating it.

Beaumont’s work was published in 1833 in Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, which made him famous.