In the annual riot of trading and boozing at the fur company store on Mackinac Island on a June afternoon in 1822, a gun went off accidentally and blasted a gaping hole in the belly of Alexis St. Martin, ig, a French Canadian voyageur. For the rest of his days he had a hole in his abdominal wall leading directly into his stomach. The blast that let the daylight into St. Martin's stomach enabled U.S. Army Surgeon William Beaumont, in years of experiments, to shed the first light on the mysteries of human digestion.
In 1895 the father of an Irish family...
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