Inquisitive doctor, reluctant patient: the story of Alexis St. Martin's gastric fistula and America's first physiologist, Dr. William Beaumont, who discovered gastric juice and the physiology of digestion (1822–1833; video shown by permission of the Mackinac Island State Park Commission)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On June 6, 1822, inside the American Fur Company's store on Mackinac Island, epicenter for the fur trading enterprise in the Great Lakes region, a French Canadian voyageur named Alexis St. Martin (1794–1880) was accidently shot in the stomach. Dr. William Beaumont (1785–1853), Post‐Surgeon at Fort Mackinac (1820–1825), attended to St. Martin's injuries over the next 3 years, but his stomach wound never closed resulting in a permanent gastric fistula. Recognizing a serendipitous opportunity to study digestion, the doctor began tying small bits of food to string and lowering them through the fistula into St. Martin's stomach, recording how long it took to digest the food. Beaumont conducted 238 experiments intermittently over 8 years at Fort Mackinac, MI (1825); Fort Niagara, NY (1825); Fort Crawford, WI (1829–31), and Washington D.C. (1832–33). In 1833 he published his discoveries in “Experiments and observations on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion”. Beaumont's pioneering studies established the field of digestive physiology, identifying HCl as the important element in gastric juice along with 50 other conclusions from his experiments (5.5 min video will be shown) (USF).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".