Beaumont

Beaumont city (1990 pop. 114,323), seat of Jefferson co., Tex., on the Sabine-Neches Waterway; inc. 1838. A ship channel provides the facilities of a modern deepwater port, with shipyards and large storage tanks. Beaumont is a major oil city. With Port Arthur and Orange , it forms the "Golden Triangle," a vast petrochemical and industrial complex. Other industries are based on the forests and farmlands of the area. There are rice mills, granaries, lumber and paper plants, meatpacking houses, and huge metalworks. Lush East Texas pine forests were the base of the lumbering that began here before the Civil War. Shipbuilding followed, and as livestock raising and rice farming spread in the surrounding area, Beaumont became a processing and transportation center. Its life was revolutionized in 1901 when the world's first principal oil gusher came in at nearby Spindletop; a 58-ft (18-m) granite shaft marks the spot, now a national historic site. Beaumont has pioneer and oil museums and an art center and is the seat of Lamar Univ. Annual events include a horse show, a river festival, and a rodeo.

Beaumont, William (1785–1853), physician and scientist, the first American physiologist to achieve international renown.A native of Lebanon, Connecticut, Beaumont earned a license to practice medicine in 1812 after an apprenticeship with a physician in northern Vermont. From 1812 to 1839, Beaumont mostly served in the medical department of the United States Army: on the Canadian border during the War of 1812 and at various frontier posts in the Great Lakes region during the 1820s and 1830s. After his retirement from the army, Beaumont established a successful private practice in St. Louis, Missouri, where he lived until his death.

Beaumont achieved permanent fame for his research on human digestion. In June 1822, while at Fort Mackinac in Michigan Territory, Beaumont treated a French‐Canadian voyageur, Alexis St. Martin, who had been shot in the stomach. The wound healed in such a manner as to leave a permanent gastric fistula, or opening. This enabled Beaumont to insert food into St. Martin's stomach, observe the digestive process, and remove gastric juice for analysis. At different times over the next decade, working in extremely difficult conditions, Beaumont pursued his experiments. Much of his most valuable work was carried out in Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Beaumont's book, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion (1833), established that digestion was a chemical process, a finding quickly accepted in both in the United States and Europe.
See also Medicine: From 1776 to the 1870s.

Bibliography

Jesse D. Myer , Life and Letters of Dr. William Beaumont, 1912.
Reginald Horsman , Frontier Doctor: William Beaumont, America's First Great Medical Scientist, 1996.

Reginald Horsman