[RADIOLAB INTRO]

MARY ROACH: Hello.

JAD ABUMRAD: We're gonna start this show today ...

TIM HOWARD: Hey, Mary.

JAD: ... with Mary Roach.

MARY ROACH: Hey.

TIM: Tim here.

MARY ROACH: Hi, Tim.

TIM: Hey, let me see if I can ...

JAD: Mary is one of our favorite authors, mostly because she kind of writes about stuff that's ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Icky.

JAD: Gross.

MARY ROACH: I'm the kind of person, if I find myself in an operating room for whatever I'm reporting on, I'm the kind of person where they'll be like, "Ms. Roach, you need to step back. Your head is actually inside the body cavity."

TIM: [laughs]

JAD: And for her latest book ...

MARY ROACH: Called Gulp.

JAD: She got really, really into—and inside—cows.

MARY ROACH: Yeah. The fistulated cows that the agricultural schools have.

JAD: And what's a fistulated cow?

MARY ROACH: A fistula is an irregular anatomical passageway.

JAD: And a fistulated cow ...

MARY ROACH: You know, in this case ...

JAD: ... has a hole ...

MARY ROACH: ... an opening ...

JAD: ... right in its side. So that you can actually stick your hand into its side and reach all the way down ...

MARY ROACH: ... to the stomach.

JAD: This is a living cow, right? It's a mooing ...

MARY ROACH: It's a live cow.

JAD: And you've done this?

MARY ROACH: Yeah. It was—it was this amazing—because really, you know, a cow is a ...

ROBERT: She did it at the University of California-Davis.

MARY ROACH: You're standing there, and sort of normally. And for some reason I've worn a skirt and kitten heels, and my hosts are wearing manure encrusted muck boots, and it's a source of great entertainment that I'm here.

ROBERT: And you're in pearls.

MARY ROACH: Yeah. And it's packed really tightly. You got to really work your arm. The guy I was with, Ed DePeters, he's like, "No, keep going. Keep going." I'm like, "I don't know, Ed. I'm not sure. Really?"

ROBERT: Go further in?

MARY ROACH: Yeah, keep going, keep going. I'm literally up to my shoulder inside this cow.

JAD: I so want to do that.

MARY ROACH: Where are you guys?

ROBERT: We're in New York.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, I know where there's one out there. I can get you a fistulated cow.

JAD: [laughs]

SCIENTIST: You want to walk him down towards the barn and I'll go get the group?

JAD: I didn't actually get to do it, unfortunately, but we sent our producer Tim Howard ...

TIM: Hi, I'm Tim.

JAD: ... out to Rutgers University,

SCIENTIST: Come on in closer.

JAD: ... where a bunch of high schoolers had come to see ...

SCIENTIST: Lily.

TIM: Lily.

JAD: ... Lily the fistulated cow.

SCIENTIST: Okay, let's give it a go. I'm gonna pop the cork.

ROBERT: Did he say cork?

JAD: Yeah. You have to uncork the hole in the cow.

SCIENTIST: You can see the steam coming out? Ready?

TIM: All right.

JAD: This is Tim reaching his hand in.

SCIENTIST: Go straight across the top to the far side.

TIM: Okay. Oh my God!

MARY ROACH: It's powerful in there.

TIM: Oh, God!

MARY ROACH: I mean, I was a little worried it was gonna break my hand.

ROBERT: What, you mean like pressure?

MARY ROACH: It's a very muscular organ.

STUDENT: It's squeezing my arm.

MARY ROACH: It's mixing and ...

TIM: Wow. I can feel the side of the stomach pushing against me.

MARY ROACH: ... squeezing and contracting.

JAD: Whoa!

TIM: It's really squeezing!

MARY ROACH: It's groping you back.

STUDENT: I'm stuck.

TIM: I'm just gonna try to go a little bit deeper.

MARY ROACH: And it's hot. It's steamy.

STUDENT: I don't know. It's, like, bubbly.

MARY ROACH: Physical. It's very—yeah.

JAD: [laughs]

TIM: And she is so calm right now. I can't believe it.

MARY ROACH: The cow's bored, and I've got this look on my face like I've seen God or something. I'm like, "Whoa!"

ROBERT: Mary says that, for all her times in morgues and in all the places she's been, this one, this one was really different.

MARY ROACH: The expression I was wearing, I'm sure I've never had cause to use.

JAD: And here's why: if you think about it ...

FRED KAUFMAN: The stomach is a center of magical transformation.

JAD: That is Fred Kaufman, who wrote a whole book about the stomach.

FRED KAUFMAN: You take something outside of your body, you put it in your body and it turns into you.

JAD: So it's like this conduit between what's outside you and what's inside.

FRED KAUFMAN: The other thing that's weird is that the human body is a torus. We're donuts. We've got a hole going through the middle of us, all the way through us. So what seems to be inside us, what seems to be inside our stomach, actually is always outside us.

ROBERT: Oh, this is getting so deep.

JAD: You don't like the torus?

ROBERT: No, I think it's great. I think I'll go with it.

JAD: Because I was thinking we could start that way because that's what we're kind of doing this hour. We're gonna take this thing that's deep inside us ...

ROBERT: And turn it inside out.

JAD: Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today? Guts! That mystery that lies between our mouth ...

ROBERT: ... and our butts.

MARY ROACH: We are these sacks of guts and we've got these skeletons, and we walk around and we never even see them. And for centuries, nobody really knew what's going on in there.

JAD: But then something happened that opened up a window.

MARY ROACH: Yeah. Do you want to start back at the ...

ROBERT: Yeah, let's start at the beginning of it.

JAD: Yeah, let's once-upon-a-time it.

MARY ROACH: Okay. So ...

ROBERT: Once upon a time ...

MARY ROACH: ... it all begins.

JAD: And when is this?

MARY ROACH: They first met in 1822.

JAD: Once upon a time in 1822, there was a guy named William Beaumont.

FRED KAUFMAN: William Beaumont is a farm boy from Lebanon, Connecticut. Five brothers and six sisters.

ROBERT: And William ...

FRED KAUFMAN: ... clearly is the smart one.

ROBERT: He was the one with big dreams.

JAD: So at an early age ...

FRED KAUFMAN: He leaves home ...

JAD: And gets himself a job as a doctor.

FRED KAUFMAN: An army doctor.

JAD: Up north.

MARY ROACH: At Fort Mackinac, which is this—it's a trading post, basically.

JAD: So Beaumont, he has a little doctor's office at the top of this hill. And at the bottom ...

MARY ROACH: There's a general store.

JAD: For fur traders who would come in from Canada.

MARY ROACH: Super hardy dudes. Like, it's cold up there and they're going out in canoes and they're running with these huge packages of furs on their backs.

JAD: I imagine big beards.

MARY ROACH: Sure.

JAD: In any case, that was all just set up. Here's the actual story: one day ...

FRED KAUFMAN: June 6, 1822.

JAD: Normal morning.

MARY ROACH: All the fur traders come in and are unloading and loading.

JAD: Getting their coffee, salted meat.

MARY ROACH: Supplies to go out.

JAD: Trap some fur. When all of a sudden.

FRED KAUFMAN: Boom!

JAD: Right outside the shop ...

MARY ROACH: Somebody's gun went off. Somebody calls Beaumont. Beaumont ...

JAD: ... dashes out the door.

MARY ROACH: Runs down the hill. Finds this guy.

JAD: This 18-year-old kid ...

MARY ROACH: Really in bad shape.

JAD: The kid's lying on the ground. He's a big guy, muscular, but he's covered in blood.

FRED KAUFMAN: And he has a hole ...

JAD: ... right below his rib cage ...

FRED KAUFMAN: ... about the size of the palm of a grown man's hand.

ROBERT: Nobody was sure what happened, but someone's gun had gone off ...

FRED KAUFMAN: ... by accident ...

ROBERT: ... and shot this boy point-blank.

FRED KAUFMAN: His lungs are dripping out. There's blood.

JAD: This is what Beaumont sees when he shows up.

FRED KAUFMAN: This is what Beaumont sees. And the other thing Beaumont sees is food coming out of his stomach.

MARY ROACH: Meat and bread and coffee.

FRED KAUFMAN: Yeah.

MARY ROACH: Basically, the remnants of his breakfast spilled out.

JAD: On the ground, right in front of him.

MARY ROACH: You can kind of see the gears turning in Beaumont's head as if he's thinking ...

JAD: "Whoa, there it is."

MARY ROACH: Digestion in action.

ROBERT: Which was kind of disgusting, but it was also something of a revelation because in 1822 ...

FRED KAUFMAN: ... the stomach was an area of mystery. Just like today we're aware of the brain is an area of mystery.

JAD: And for centuries, people believed that the stomach—more broadly, the gut—was, in a very real way, the center of our beings.

FRED KAUFMAN: Yes, in Puritan times, the bowels are the seat of human sympathy.

JAD: You know, like, where our deepest feelings come from.

FRED KAUFMAN: If you have bowels for somebody, that means you sympathize with them.

JAD: Was that something people would say?

FRED KAUFMAN: Absolutely.

JAD: Wow, we should bring that term back.

ROBERT: That's very interesting. "I have bowels for you."

JAD: Point is, medical science was pretty fuzzy on what happens down there. I mean, they knew it was important, but they had no idea how it worked. Like, how does food become us?

FRED KAUFMAN: Nobody understood it.

MARY ROACH: Because they can't see. You can't directly observe it without opening the person up.

ROBERT: But here was a guy opened right up.

JAD: But of course, Beaumont is a doctor, so he's like, "Wait, I've gotta save this guy." So he starts sewing him up frantically. Pretty sure this fellow's not gonna make it.

MARY ROACH: And he was surprised that two days later the guy was alive.

JAD: Really surprised. And as the months passed, this kid ...

MARY ROACH: St. Martin.

JAD: That was his name: Alexis St. Martin. He gets better, but ...

FRED KAUFMAN: A year later, he still has this hole in his stomach.

JAD: The hole never closes.

MARY ROACH: What happened is he grew a fistula.

ROBERT: You know, just like the cow we talked about earlier, except in this case, he didn't have a cork where he was wounded. He had a flap of skin covering the hole. If you wanted to, you just pulled back the flap and look inside.

JAD: And we don't know if Beaumont left it that way on purpose. What we do know is that he sees an opportunity.

MARY ROACH: To make the body give up its secrets.

FRED KAUFMAN: He sees he's got something that nobody else has.

JAD: Maybe he even thinks ...

MARY ROACH: This man could be my ticket out of being a lowly Fort Mackinac doctor.

FRED KAUFMAN: So Beaumont kind of hires him as a man around his house.

MARY ROACH: As a manservant. You know, he said, "Oh, it was a charitable thing. I wanted to help him."

JAD: You know, because he couldn't work.

MARY ROACH: And I'm thinking, "I don't know. Maybe, maybe not."

FRED KAUFMAN: And so about a year later, he starts.

ARLENE SHANER: Come on in.

FRED KAUFMAN: He starts his experiments.

JAD: Oh my Lord, this is straight out of a movie.

JAD: While reporting this story, we ended up visiting the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine, which is pretty much the coolest room ever. It's all mahogany, and they've got, like, ancient skulls sitting on top of bookshelves. And the books are ...

ARLENE SHANER: Hundreds and hundreds of years old.

JAD: In any case, the librarian Arlene Shaner ...

ARLENE SHANER: That's me. [laughs]

JAD: ... showed us around. And then put on some white gloves, disappeared between some stacks, and came out ...

ARLENE SHANER: But here we have ...

JAD: ... with a little purple book.

ARLENE SHANER: Beaumont's observations. Experiment one is on August 1, 1825. "So at 12 o'clock, I introduced through the perforation into the stomach, the following articles of diet."

FRED KAUFMAN: So what he does is he takes different foods.

ARLENE SHANER: "A piece of raw, salted fat pork."

FRED KAUFMAN: Some corned beef. You know, like a one-inch square of corned beef.

ARLENE SHANER: "A piece of stale bread."

FRED KAUFMAN: And he attaches them to a silk string, and he inserts them ...

ARLENE SHANER: ... through the artificial opening into the stomach.

FRED KAUFMAN: Into the stomach for an hour. Then he takes it out.

ROBERT: Like a fisherman?

FRED KAUFMAN: Yeah. Yeah, he's fishing. He's doing stomach fishing. And he takes it out and he records, you know ...

ARLENE SHANER: So it was an hour later ...

FRED KAUFMAN: ... how much was digested.

ARLENE SHANER: "Withdrew and examined them. Found the cabbage and bread about half-digested. The pieces of meat ...

JAD: This went on for hours ...

ARLENE SHANER: "... returned them into the stomach. At two o'clock p.m., withdrew them again.

JAD: ... and hours.

ARLENE SHANER: "Returned them into the stomach again."

ROBERT: For years! Over the next few years, Beaumont puts anything he can possibly think of into that stomach.

ARLENE SHANER: Pig's feet, soused. Take an hour. Animal brains, boiled, take an hour and 45 minutes. Fresh eggs, hard-boiled, take three hours and 30 minutes. Soft-boiled take three hours. Fresh eggs, fried, take three hours and 30 minutes. Fresh eggs, roasted, take two hours and 15 minutes.

FRED KAUFMAN: Look, it's just the totality of food in America at that point.

ARLENE SHANER: Whipped eggs take an hour and a half.

FRED KAUFMAN: He's trying everything.

ARLENE SHANER: Baked custard takes two hours and 45 minutes.

JAD: Oh my God. It goes on for pages!

ARLENE SHANER: It goes on and on.

FRED KAUFMAN: Alexis St. Martin is becoming increasingly irritable about this whole process.

JAD: I would imagine!

JAD: Because a lot of the times the things that Beaumont would stick into his stomach would make him sick. Give him ...

ARLENE SHANER: A fever, pain in his head, depressed pulse, dry skin, coated tongue, and numerous ...

JAD: So in 1825, three years after this all started, St. Martin finally bolts. Goes back to Canada, gets married, even has a few kids. All the while, Beaumont is writing him letters, trying to lure him back.

MARY ROACH: He was offering him, "Okay, I'll pay for your family. Okay, I'll give you $50 a year. Okay, I'll give you $75." And then, he was like, "I'll throw in the land."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Because, you know, he still wanted to know, like, "All right, fine. It takes ..."

ARLENE SHANER: Three hours and 15 minutes.

JAD: "... to digest a carrot."

JAD: Oyster soup, three and a half hours.

JAD: Or soup. Whatever. But how does it work? How does the stomach do it?

ROBERT: And eventually, because he needed the money, Alexis St. Martin does come back.

ARLENE SHANER: Beaumont starts his experiments again.

JAD: And one night, while Beaumont is peering into the boy's stomach, he gets his answer.

ARLENE SHANER: He applies a few crumbs of bread to the inner surface of the stomach. Immediately afterwards, small, sharp papillae became visible.

JAD: He saw little pimples form on the wall of the stomach, and out of the pimples ...

ARLENE SHANER: ... exuded a clear, transparent liquor.

ROBERT: Out squirts some juice!

ARLENE SHANER: Out squirts some juice.

JAD: And that was it.

FRED KAUFMAN: That's the magic juice.

ARLENE SHANER: Clear, almost transparent. Tasted a little saltish and acid when applied to the tongue.

ROBERT: Eww!

MARY ROACH: Yeah. Tasting. A lot of tasting went on.

ARLENE SHANER: And then ...

MARY ROACH: ... he would collect the stomach acid, and see if you could digest outside the body because there was this theory that the body had this vital force, and that that was necessary for the bodily processes—including digestion. So if you took the stomach acid out, what would happen?

ARLENE SHANER: "December 14, 1829. At one o'clock p.m., I took one and a half ounces of gastric juice fresh from the stomach, put into it 12 drams recently salted beef, boiled."

MARY ROACH: The theory at the time was that it wouldn't work. You had to have the magical powers of the human body.

ARLENE SHANER: "But digestion commenced."

MARY ROACH: Beaumont, one of his big discoveries was no, you don't.

FRED KAUFMAN: That actually there are no secret forces of sympathy and excitement driving things. It's a chemical.

JAD: That's what it's all about.

ROBERT: Now Beaumont didn't know it, but that juice he was seeing?

JAD: Which he called ...

ARLENE SHANER: ... gastric juice.

JAD: Those are enzymes. And what enzymes are are like little chemical scissors. They break down food so that you can take something in from the outside, like this carrot [crunches carrot] and absorb it. It becomes literally a part of you.

FRED KAUFMAN: The key to the whole thing, the key to life are enzymes.

JAD: In a way, they are the magical force, just in chemical form.

FRED KAUFMAN: That's it. That's the truth. He was the first to understand it, the first to see it, the first to figure out the method of how to prove it, and he proved it.

JAD: So Beaumont writes a book about this.

ARLENE SHANER: And this book is published in 1833.

FRED KAUFMAN: And he becomes famous.

ARLENE SHANER: People were fascinated by Beaumont's experiments.

MARY ROACH: He would kind of go on these tours.

FRED KAUFMAN: He's called over to Yale University.

ROBERT: Gets invited to speak in Europe.

FRED KAUFMAN: With his—wherever he goes, he brings his gastric juice and he lectures there.

JAD: From the dude's stomach?

FRED KAUFMAN: Yeah. He travels around with it. [laughs]

JAD: And whenever he could, he would take St. Martin with him.

MARY ROACH: St. Martin was his PowerPoint. You know, he's like, "I need you, man. I need you on the stage so everyone else can come up and stick their tongue in your stomach." [laughs]

ROBERT: For William Beaumont, this works out pretty great.

MARY ROACH: He's thought of as this tremendous contributor to the understanding of digestion.

JAD: As for Alexis St. Martin ...

FRED KAUFMAN: He was a curiosity. He was a medical curiosity.

JAD: For the rest of his life.

FRED KAUFMAN: Until the day he dies.

MARY ROACH: Even in death ...

JAD: ... his body is a hot commodity.

FRED KAUFMAN: And his family was very aware of this. They let his body rot in the sun for three days, and then buried him very deeply and put big rocks over him so he would not be exhumed.

JAD: Thanks to Arlene Shaner at the New York Academy of Medicine, and Fred Kaufman who wrote a book called A Short History of the American Stomach.

ROBERT: A special thanks to Mary Roach. Her forthcoming book is called Gulp: A Trip Down the Alimentary Canal.

[FRED KAUFMAN: Hey, everybody. Frederick Kaufman here. I'm giving my shot at the credits, so here we go. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and ...]

[MARY ROACH: ... the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[FRED KAUFMAN: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[MARY ROACH: Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[FRED KAUFMAN: NPR.]

[MARY ROACH: This is Mary Roach. Thanks. Bye!]

 

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