“Well,” sais I, “why on earth don’t your friend the Mackinic cook go to London or Paris, where he won’t want a pension, or anything else, if he excels them great men?”
“Bless you, Sir,” he replied, “he is merely a voyageur.”
“Oh dear,” sais I, “I dare say then he can fry ham and eggs and serve ’em up in ile, boil salt beef and pork, and twice lay cod-fish, and perhaps boil potatoes nice and watery like cattle turnips. What discoveries could such a rough-and-tumble fellow as that make?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “I didn’t want to put myself forward, for it ain’t pleasant to speak of oneself.”
“Well, I don’t know that,” sais I, “I ain’t above it, I assure you. If you have a horse to sell, put a thunderin’ long price on him, and folks will think he must be the devil and all, and if you want people to vally you right, appraise yourself at a high figure. Braggin’ saves advertising’. I always do it; for as the Nova Scotia magistrate said, who sued his debtor before himself, ‘What’s the use of being a justice, if you can’t do yourself justice.’ But what was you sayin’ about the voyageur?”
“Why, Sir,” said he, “I made the discovery through his instrumentality. He enabled me to do it by suffering the experiments to be made on him. His name was Alexis St Martin; he was a Canadian, and about eighteen years of age, of good constitution, robust, and healthy. He had been engaged in the service of the American Fur Company as a voyageur, and was accidentally wounded by the discharge of a musket, on the 9th of June, 1822. The charge, consisting of powder and duck-shot, was received in his left side; he being at a distance of not more than one yard from the muzzle of the gun. The contents entered posteriorly, and in an oblique direction, forward and inward, literally blowing off integuments and muscles, of the size of a man’s hand, fracturing and carrying away the anterior half of the sixth rib, fracturing the fifth, lacerating the lower portion of the left lobe of the lungs, the diaphragm, and perforating the stomach.”
“Good gracious!” sais I, “how plain that is expressed! It is as clear as mud, that! I do like doctors, for their talking and writing is intelligible to the meanest capacity.”
He looked pleased, and went ahead agin.
“After trying all the means in my power for eight or ten months to close the orifice, by exciting adhesive inflammation in the lips of the wound, without the least appearance of success, I gave it up as impracticable, in any other way than that of incising and bringing them together by sutures; an operation to which the patient would not submit. By using the aperture which providence had supplied us with to communicate with the stomach, I ascertained, by attaching a small portion of food of different kinds to a string, and inserting it through his side, the exact time each takes for digestion, such as beef or pork, or mutton or fowl, or fish or vegetables, cooked in different ways.1 We all know how long it takes to dress them, but we did not know how long a time they required for digestion. I will show you a comparative table.”
1 The village doctor appears to have appropriated to himself the credit due to another. The particulars of this remarkable case are to be found in a work published in New York in 1833, entitled “Experiments and observations on the gastric juices, and the physiology of digestion,” by William Beaumont, M. D., Surgeon in the United States’ Army, and also in the “Albion” newspaper of the same place for January 4, 1834.