RT Journal
A1 Bagdasarian N
T1 Open wound: The tragic obsession of dr. william beaumont
JF JAMA
JO JAMA
YR 2012
FD April 18
VO 307
IS 15
SP 1648
OP 1649
DO 10.1001/jama.2012.495
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.495
AB 
Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr William Beaumont by Jason Karlawish is a novel based on the life of a real-life 19th-century army surgeon best remembered for his study of human digestion. The surgeon, William Beaumont, published a text entitled Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion in 1833, in which he described the chemical nature of digestion. Until that time, digestion had been considered by many to be a purely mechanical process in which food was churned and pulverized in the stomach. Beaumont's book received mixed reviews, but his story is intriguing for the methods he used to study human digestion.