Alexis St. Martin
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Alexis St. Martin (1794-1880) was a Canadian voyaguer who on June 6,1822 at a fur-trading post in Mackinac Island in Lake Huron was accidentally shot with a round of bird-shot. It caught his shirt on fire, and blew a hole through his skin and into his stomach. William Beaumont was stationed at a nearby army post and treated the wound. Alexis was not expected to recover, and in fact for the next 17 days, all food he ate reemerged from his new gastric fistula. When the wound healed itself, the edge of the hole in the stomach had attached itself to the edge of the hole in the skin creating a permanent gastric fistula. There was very little scientific understanding of digestion at the time, and Beaumont experimented on and studied St. Martin off and on until 1833.
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