In 1822, a fur trapper was shot in the stomach from three feet away. He survived. The hole never closed. And for the next decade, his doctor used it as a window.

His name was Alexis St. Martin, a young French Canadian voyageur. On the 6th of June 1822, in the fur company store on Mackinac Island, a shotgun went off by accident, and St. Martin took the blast in his side. The army surgeon, William Beaumont, patched him up and privately gave him hours to live. He lived. But the wound healed wrong, and wonderfully wrong: the lip of his stomach fused to the edge of his skin, leaving a permanent opening. A lid. You could lift it, and look inside a living, working human stomach.

Beaumont understood exactly what fortune had handed him. He hired St. Martin as a household servant whose real job was the hole. Then the experiments began. Beaumont tied morsels of food to silk threads, roast beef, salt pork, stale bread, raw cabbage, lowered them through the opening into the stomach, and pulled them out hour after hour to watch digestion happen. He drew off gastric juice and digested meat in cups on his desk. Two hundred and thirty eight experiments. Fifty one published conclusions. Between them, the accidental founding of an entire science: proof that the stomach works by chemistry, not grinding. There was one problem. St. Martin hated all of it. He kept escaping home to Quebec, and Beaumont kept reeling him back with contracts, formal signed articles binding him to submit his stomach to science for board and about a hundred and fifty dollars a year. It was a tug of war, and it lasted twenty years.

In the end, the stomach won. St. Martin outlived his doctor by twenty seven years, raised a large family, and farmed into old age with the window still open in his side. When he died, in 1880, the great physicians of the day asked for the famous stomach, for a museum. His family answered by leaving his body out in the June heat for days, until no museum on earth would want it, then burying him eight feet down under a pile of rocks, in a grave they kept unmarked and secret for over eighty years. Medicine got ten years through the window. It never got the stomach.

Dead serious. I do one of these every day. Subscribe.