Alex A Green 2010
Alex A Green 2010
Alex A Green 2010
Martin, and
Medical Research in Antebellum America
Alexa Green
Access provided by Australian National University (17 Aug 2018 17:44 GMT)
Working Ethics: William Beaumont,
Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research
in Antebellum America
alexa green
I want to thank Sandra Eder, Mary Fissell, Bert Hansen, Tulley Long, Harry Marks,
Andrew Russell, Mary Ryan, James Schafer, Dan Todes, Ron Walters, members of the Gradu-
ate Student Dissertation Reading Group at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of
Science, Medicine and Technology, and the anonymous reviewers for the Bulletin of the His-
tory of Medicine for their helpful comments and suggestions.
use the more liberal interpretation of medical ethics in this essay, show-
ing how medical research was shaped by local, historically contingent
factors.3 Such an analysis is important because, although Beaumont’s
nontherapeutic experimentalism was uncommon, antebellum clinicians
routinely produced scientific knowledge from a single patient.4 Human
experimentation before the twentieth century has generally been treated
as a collection of exceptional cases; in this essay, I attempt to reintegrate
human vivisection into a broader view of social and medical history.5
Earlier historians and commentators tended to describe Beaumont’s
relationship to St. Martin in terms of benevolence while highlighting
the greater good of his research.6 It was not until later in the twentieth
century, after revelations of human subject abuses at Tuskegee and Wil-
lowbrook, that historians began to question the propriety of Beaumont’s
relationship with St. Martin.7 Ronald Numbers reflected this newfound
“Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages,” Bull. Hist. Med., 1997, 71 : 201–23. Laurence
McCullough holds with a more formal definition of ethics but argues (against Leake) that
Gregory’s codes had real moral content for doctor–patient interactions. See McCullough,
“The Legacy of Modern Anglo-American Medical Ethics: Correcting Some Misperceptions,”
in The Clinical Encounter: The Moral Fabric of the Patient-Physician Relationship, ed. Earl E. Shelp
(Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1983), and John Gregory and The Invention of Professional
Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1998).
3. For Western researchers working in developing parts of Asia and Africa, where insti-
tutions of medical ethics are absent or radically different, the past may serve as a guide for
understanding how human subjects comprehend medical research. See David J. Rothman,
“The Shame of Medical Research,” New York Review of Books, 2000, 47 (19), http://www.
nybooks.com/articles/13907; and Udo Schuklenk, “The Standard of Care Debate: Against
the Myth of an ‘International Consensus Opinion,’” J. Med. Ethics, 2004, 30 : 194 –97.
4. Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
5. The case of Marion Sims, who developed important surgical techniques for vesico-
vaginal fistula using enslaved African American women, is another provocative example.
Todd Savitt’s 1982 essay is among the most thoroughgoing survey of antebellum vivisection:
“The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,”
J. South. Hist., 1982, 48 : 331–48. Susan Lederer briefly surveys early examples of human
experimentation but concentrates on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when clinical experimentation became more common. See Lederer, Subjected to Science:
Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995).
6. These early commentators largely reproduced Beaumont’s own characterization of
the relationship. See, for example, William Osler, “William Beaumont: A Backwood Physi-
ologist,” in An Alabama Student and Other Biographical Essays (London: Oxford University
Press, 1909), pp. 159–88.
7. David J. Rothman, “Human Experimentation and the Origins of Bioethics in the
United States,” in Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics, ed. George Weisz (Boston: Klu-
wer, 1990), pp. 185–200.
196 alexa green
lum American market revolution.11 Over the course of the first half of the
nineteenth century, America saw massive social and cultural shifts linked
to the emergence of new kinds of labor and a cash economy. The tran-
sition to capitalism gradually eroded forms of labor based on bondage,
deference, and paternalism while promoting those based around ideas
of contract, equality, and autonomy.12 The history of employment rela-
tions, however, was always uneven, with old and new models coexisting
and recombined in various ways. On one hand, ideas of “wage-contract”
became pervasive enough to recast therapeutic medical interactions, long
a stronghold of status-based relations, as a fungible market commod-
ity. Nineteenth-century courts began interpreting malpractice cases as
breaches of contract, while physicians explored “cure-contracts,” prepaid
medical service contracts, and other market pricing structures.13 On the
other hand, as Christopher Tomlins has shown, antebellum America saw
11. This approach owes a debt to analyses of twentieth-century scientific research as work.
Dan Todes, for example, shows the centrality of the factory as a model and metaphor for
scientific production in the work of Ivan Pavlov: Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory:
Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001). In an era of domestic production, Beaumont similarly used the discursive and orga-
nizational strategies of a dominant economic mode.
12. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell,
Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Karen Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Karen Orren, Belated Feudal-
ism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development in the United States (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract:
Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in
America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1996); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and The Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Wilentz, “Society,
Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), pp. 61–84.
13. On malpractice cases, see Kenneth DeVille, Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-Century
America: Origins and Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 1990); and James C. Mohr,
Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993). On medical pricing in the antebellum period, see George Rosen,
Fees and Fee Bills: Some Economic Aspects of Medical Practice in Nineteenth Century America (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946). Beaumont’s own papers contain a letter from
a patient soliciting a “cure-contract,” although he does not appear to have taken up the
offer. See Alexa Green, “The Market Cultures of William Beaumont: Ethics, Science and
Medicine in Antebellum America, 1820–1865” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University,
2006), pp. 44 –45.
198 alexa green
14. Christopher L. Tomlins, “The Ties that Bind: Master and Servant in Massachusetts,
1800–1850,” Labor Hist., 1989, 30 : 193–227.
15. William Beaumont, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology
of Digestion (Plattsburgh, N.Y.: F. P. Allen, 1833).
16. Green, “The Market Cultures of William Beaumont” (n. 13).
17. Kevin Thornton, “A Cultural Frontier: Ethnicity and the Marketplace in Charlotte,
Vermont, 1845–1860,” in Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789–1860,
ed. Scott C. Martin (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Medical Research in Antebellum America 199
St. Lawrence, had paddled and portaged a canoe laden with goods deep
into the interior of the continent to trade with Native Americans. The
accident that left him permanently disfigured occurred as St. Martin was
outfitting himself at an American Fur Company store in preparation for
another seasonal voyage. Under Beaumont’s care, St. Martin recuperated
first at a military hospital and then as a ward of the county. As his condi-
tion improved, the local government declined further support, and St.
Martin went to live with Beaumont and his family. By 1825, when Beau-
mont began his experiments on Mackinaw Island, St. Martin’s condition
had improved so much that he was incorporated into the household as
a domestic servant. After the period at Mackinaw, St. Martin returned to
Canada, married, and worked another season in the fur trade as a voya-
geur. In 1828, St. Martin brought his family to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin,
where they lived on close terms with Beaumont’s family, with St. Martin
again acting as a servant and experimental subject. St. Martin returned
with his family to Canada in 1831, coming back alone the following year to
accompany Beaumont in Washington and New York as a personal servant
and the subject of a final series of experiments. St. Martin left Beaumont
permanently in 1834, despite protracted negotiations for his return. With
the exception of a brief tour of U.S. medical colleges to demonstrate his
fistula in the 1840s, St. Martin supported himself in Canada in the fur
trade and farming. He died in 1881 of natural causes.18
St. Martin labored in the Beaumont household for several years before
he became an experimental subject, and the ideas and practices of labor
shaped how Beaumont and St. Martin lived together day to day. In Macki-
naw and Prairie du Chien, St. Martin served in Beaumont’s household as
an informal domestic servant. While in Mackinac, St. Martin worked along-
side Beaumont’s wife, Deborah, to maintain the household. Having grown
up in the relative comfort of upstate New York, Deborah appreciated the
hard work required to keep a frontier household running smoothly. In a
note to her family in Plattsburgh in December of 1823, she complained
(and boasted), “I have no creature but an invalid boy to do a thing for
me, . . . I have two babies, and am on the rapid march for a third, that
I do all my sewing, kniting niting [sic], baking, make my own butter.”19
The “invalid boy” to whom Deborah referred was St. Martin, who had
18. On St. Martin after 1833 and his tour of medical schools, see Edward H. Bensley,
“Alexis St. Martin and Dr. Bunting,” Bull. Hist. Med., 1970, 44 : 101–8.
19. Beaumont to Israel Green (with postscript from Deborah Beaumont describing
her household work), 18 December 1823 (ALS Mackinac), William Beaumont Collection,
Washington University, School of Medicine Library, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter cited as
WBC).
200 alexa green
only recently recovered from his gunshot wound. Deborah might have
preferred more robust help, but St. Martin was essential to the household.
Like other domestic servants on Mackinac, he likely bore the task of bring-
ing fuel and water into the house. St. Martin probably received nominal
wages in these years, especially after he was fully recovered, but his chief
compensation was in kind, in the form of room and board. Leaving aside
the fistula, the arrangement was structurally similar to the ways in which
other antebellum American households secured extra manual labor.20 A
year before St. Martin’s injury, for example, an adolescent cousin of Debo-
rah Beaumont had served the family in exchange for room and board.21
This common practice gave St. Martin and Beaumont a model for how a
young man’s body could be put to use in a household.
Years later, at Prairie du Chien, St. Martin also spent most of his time
laboring in and around the Beaumont household. St. Martin now had
a wife and children and was no longer subsumed under the Beaumont
household in the same way, but his daily routine still centered on per-
forming physical labor for Beaumont. When Beaumont began a second
series of experiments in late 1829, the scientific research occurred in the
interstices of everyday work. In Experiments and Observations Beaumont
described how St. Martin
entered my service, and I commenced another series of experiments on the
stomach and gastric fluids, and continued them, interruptedly, until March
1931. During this time, in the intervals of experimenting, he performed all
the duties of a common servant, chopping wood, carrying burthens, &c. with
little or no suffering or inconvenience from his wound. He laboured constantly,
became a father of more children, and enjoyed as good health and as much
vigour as men in general.22
20. Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and their Servants: Domestic Servants in the United States
from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
21. In July of 1822, Beaumont’s household at Mackinac consisted of his wife, Deborah;
their infant son, William Jr.; and Deborah’s adolescent cousin.
22. Beaumont, Experiments and Observations (n. 15), p. 19.
23. William Beaumont, “Manuscript notes by Dr. Beaumont with an account of numerous
experiments on the stomach of Alexis St. Martin,” p. 11 (Beaumont’s pagination). Handwrit-
ten note: “Notes on literature of digestion and notebook on some experiments on stomach
of Alexis St. Martin,” Misc. undated No. 2, archival note “B3,” WBC.
Medical Research in Antebellum America 201
When Beaumont and St. Martin formalized their relationship, they again
drew from the ideas and practices of antebellum labor relations. In 1832
and again in 1833, Beaumont and St. Martin signed “articles of agree-
ment” that formally articulated the two men’s responsibilities to each
other. These were notarized legal documents, about three pages in length,
signed while the two men were with Beaumont’s family in upstate New
York. In each version, St. Martin promised to “serve and abide” Beaumont
and to “submit, assist and promote” Beaumont’s experimental program.24
In return, St. Martin was to receive $150 in wages, plus room, board, cloth-
ing, and medical care. It may be tempting to see in these documents the
germ of informed consent: both parties entered the agreement freely, a
timeline and payment schedule were outlined, and St. Martin’s involve-
ment in nontherapeutic medical research was described.25 But for St. Mar-
St. Martin was first and foremost a “covenant servant” whose duties
included personal attendance and household labor. The focus of the
contract was not medical experimentation but the reciprocal financial
and moral obligations of a master and a servant. St. Martin was expected
to be “just, true and faithful” and to “exercise and employ himself” in
Beaumont’s service. The contract obligated Beaumont to pay St. Martin
a fixed cash sum, but it also stipulated nonmonetary support and pater-
nalist protection: “the said William shall & will at all times [feed] and
provide unto and for the said Alexis good suitable & sufficient meat drink
washing lodging & wearing apparel & in sickness good proper & suitable
medicine & medical attendance & nursing.”27 Beaumont was to offer St.
Martin payment and protection, and in return, St. Martin would submit
his body and will to the doctor for purposes domestic and medical.
In mixing moral and financial obligations, the contracts between Beau-
mont and St. Martin resembled other formal mechanisms for managing
subservient labor in antebellum America. Antebellum apprenticeship
contracts articulated a similar amalgam of paternalist protection and
contractual duties, formalizing a common form of domestic servitude
in which a young person would live with and work for a family. This type
of indenture normally extended until an apprentice was twenty-one,
not much younger than St. Martin when he contracted with Beaumont.
Where the articles of agreement directed St. Martin to “exercise & employ
himself” under Beaumont’s discretionary power, these indentures com-
mitted an apprentice to “faithfully serve” and “obey” the commands of
his master. Both documents described personal allegiance to a particular
master rather than the details of the work required. For St. Martin, as for
apprentices of the era, subordination was expressed in the moral terms
of being “faithfull.”29 Beaumont’s moral and in-kind obligations were
similarly echoed in those required of an apprentice’s master. The New
York indentures specified that “the said master shall use the utmost of his
endeavors to teach, or cause to be taught, or instructed, the said appren-
tice, in the trade or mystery of [a trade] And procure and provide for
him sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging, and washing, fitting for an
Apprentice, during the term. . . .”30 In emphasizing material support and
an apprentice’s voluntary commitment and “free will,” these indentures
articulated a contractual agreement. But like St. Martin’s contract with
Beaumont, apprentice indentures also required moral allegiance. Appren-
tices were asked to “faithfully serve” their masters and generally comport
themselves in a respectable fashion, regardless of their formal duties. And
like Beaumont, these masters were obliged to protect and provide for their
28. Commissioners of the Alms-House and the Department of Public Charities, “Boys
Indentures (1830–1832),” in Indentures, 1718–1727, 1792–1915 (New York City), vol. 7.,
New York Historical Society.
29. Beaumont never formally proscribed “ale-houses” or “taverns,” but he most certainly
wished he had. During their time together in Washington, Beaumont sent St. Martin out
on long walks to replicate the physical labor of frontier life and often complained that his
subject would stop for alcoholic refreshment.
30. Commissioners of the Alms-House and the Department of Public Charities, “Boys
Indentures” (n. 28).
204 alexa green
31. Chesapeake and Ohio contract reprinted in Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free
Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 189.
32. The basic unit of labor in the fur trade was a crew of several men who took consumer
goods into Indian country in canoes and traded them for pelts. Crews under the employ
of a fur company included at least one clerk (bourgeois) hired to oversee the cargo, keep
accounts, and negotiate with the Indians, as well as an interpreter to assist in negotiations.
One expedition could include several canoes, each loaded with as much as two tons of
cargo. The hard physical work of paddling and portaging fell to voyageurs (engages or “boat-
men”). Those men who stayed in the interior through the year earned the designation of
“winterer” (hivernants). Grace Lee Nute, The Voyageur (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 1931; reprint, 1987).
Medical Research in Antebellum America 205
St. Martin’s contract with Beaumont used the same language and
expressed the same kinds of relations as voyageur contracts. Voyageurs
were “engaged and bound” to a particular bourgeois, in the same way that
St. Martin was bound to Beaumont. Both contracts require a kind of moral
allegiance from the engaged: St. Martin was to “faithfully serve and obey”
Beaumont, and voyageurs were to “serve, obey and execute faithfully”
all orders from their bourgeois. And like the contract between Beaumont
and St. Martin, voyageurs were offered a mix of cash and goods for their
services:
This engagement is therefore made, for the sum of [Eight Hundred] livres or
shillings, ancient currency of Quebec, that he promises [and] binds himself
to deliver and pay to the said [Winterer one month] after his return to this
Post, and at his departure [and Equipment each year of 2 shirts, 1 blanket of 3
point, 1 Carot of Tobacco, 1 Cloth Blanket, 1 Leather Shirt, 1 Pair of Leather
Breeches, 5 pairs of Leather Shoes, and Six Pounds of Soap]. . . . Done and
passed at the said [Michilimackinac] in the year eighteen hundred [Seven] the
[twenty-fourth] of [July before] twelve o’clock; & have signed with the excep-
tion of the said [Winterer] who, having declared himself unable to do so, has
made his ordinary mark after the engagement was read to him.33
The American Fur Company provided a fixed sum for the season plus
clothing and supplies for the voyage, whereas Beaumont granted St. Mar-
tin an annual salary in addition to room, board, clothing, and medical
care while in his service. Both contracts assumed minimal literacy from
the engaged party. St. Martin signed his contract with an “X,” whereas the
Fur Company’s boilerplate made provisions for a voyageur to make “his
ordinary mark after the engagement was read to him.” St. Martin would
have been familiar with the language, structure, and relations expressed
33. Reprinted and translated in Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Character and Influence
of the Fur Trade in Wisconsin [1889],” in The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Free-
port, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 85–182, quotations on pp. 147–48. See also
references to boilerplate contracts in Nute, The Voyageur (n. 31), p. 36; and in correspon-
dence between the American Fur Company and Vallee and Boyer, 1820s–1830s, “Papers of
the American Fur Co.,” L.B.C. 9: 245–46, no. 5877, New York Historical Society.
206 alexa green
St. Martin’s labor shaped how he, Beaumont, and their contemporaries
understood and talked about the relationship. Beaumont’s social peers
were especially ready to understand St. Martin’s status and his relationship
to Beaumont in terms of St. Martin’s service. An agent for the American
Fur Company, for example, expressed St. Martin’s dependence and sub-
ordination while relating his efforts to return Beaumont’s experimental
subject:
While in Canada last winter I succeeded in finding your ingrateful Boy Alexis
St. Martin, he is Married and lives about 12 miles back from Berthier at a
place [called la chalaupe,] he is poor and miserable beyond Description and
his wound is worse than when he left you. . . . I did all I could to bring him
up but could not succeed but my endeavors cost me $14. I will be obliged if
you will let me know by return of Boat whether I shall do anything more to
get him back. . . .37
35. Francis Paul Prucha, Broadax and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Develop-
ment of the Northwest, 1815–1860 (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1953).
Prucha notes that “common labor consumed the greater part of [the] working hours” of a
private on the Northwest frontier (p. 104).
36. Enlistment formalized their relationship within an institutional structure, but it was
still necessary for Beaumont to personally negotiate and mediate between St. Martin and
the army. Like fur contracts and apprenticeships, military enlistment combined contractual
and paternalist forms of labor relations.
37. William Mathews to Beaumont, 13 August 1827 (ALS Mackinac), WBC. Another letter
from Mathews offered to “bring them up to Mackinac in the Company’s Boats and charge
as low as possible”: Mathews to Beaumont, 18 August 1827 (ALS Mackinac), WBC.
208 alexa green
Despite St. Martin’s age and marriage, the agent described St. Martin as
an “ingrateful Boy,” a wayward subordinate who had turned his back on
a benevolent master. His receipt of medical care from Beaumont and
his work as a domestic marked St. Martin as a dependent. For bourgeois
contemporaries, St. Martin’s relationship with Beaumont was clearly one
of master and servant.
Beaumont’s scientific associates similarly viewed his relationship with
St. Martin in terms of employment and servitude. American reviewers of
Experiments and Observations generally referred to St. Martin as a “patient”
but also followed Beaumont in describing St. Martin as servant.38 Of the
many letters Beaumont received after the publication of his monograph,
none questioned the doctor’s treatment of St. Martin. If anything, com-
mentators praised Beaumont for his benevolence and attention to St.
Martin’s injury. The Yale physiologist Benjamin Silliman reflected general
opinion among Beaumont’s scientific peers when he wrote admiringly of
how the doctor “took charge of the wounded man—effected his cure &
has ever since kept him in his military family.”39 Years later, proposing that
St. Martin visit England, Silliman suggested Beaumont go as well, “for I
suppose St. Martin might need you for a protector & an expounder of his
case.”40 In providing for his needs and protecting his health, Beaumont’s
behavior toward St. Martin was acceptable because it was consistent with
what a good master owed his servant. For early-nineteenth-century observ-
ers, the “ethics” of research were a function of labor relations.
Beaumont and St. Martin likewise understood and negotiated their
arrangement in terms of labor, but in discussing the appropriate scope of
their obligations to each other, each drew freely from both the language
of “free” contract employment and of paternalist servitude. Writing in
September of 1824, months before he began his experimental work, Beau-
mont described St. Martin’s situation: “The Boy is now in perfect health
& says he feels no inconvenience from the wound, except the trouble of
dressing it. He eats as heartily, and digests as perfectly as he ever did—is
strong, athletic and able bodied, performing any and every kind of labor
or amusement incident to his age & vocation. He has been in my service
since April 1823, during which period he has never had a days sickness.”41
38. “[Review of WB’s Experiments and Observations],” Western Medical Gazette [Cincin-
nati] 1834, 2 : pp. 27–36.
39. Silliman to Berzelius, 10 April 1833 (ALS), WBC.
40. Silliman to Beaumont, 5 August 1840 (ALS New Haven), WBC.
41. William Beaumont, “Dr. Beaumont’s Account of the Case of Alexis St. Martin
as Reported to Surgeon General Lovell and Published in the Medical Recorder,” 1825,
WBC.
Medical Research in Antebellum America 209
42. Ibid.
43. Draft from Beaumont to Mr. James Webster, dated by archivists January 1823,
WBC.
44. Draft from Beaumont to the Boston Physiological Society, 24 August 1837, WBC.
45. Draft from Beaumont to William Morrison, 29 May 1846, WBC.
46. William Beaumont to Israel Beaumont (ALS), dated 1846, WBC.
47. See, for example, Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants, Fifth
Annual Report of the Managers of the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants in
New York (New York, 1830).
210 alexa green
hope you will not disappoint me now Alexis, nor will you be dissatisfied
if you come—I am happy to hear of your faithfulness & fidelity to me as
respects your engagements to me, as well as the moral improvement of
your life & habits—continue to do so & you will be duly rewarded by God
& men.”54 Beaumont signed the letter “Y[ou]r friend & patron.” He used
the language of “engagements,” alluding either to St. Martin’s refusal of
other would-be experimenters or his recognition of their outstanding
contract, but he also praised St. Martin’s “faithfulness & fidelity.” St. Mar-
tin’s willingness to return to Beaumont was both a sign and product of
“moral improvement” in his “life & habits.” When prospects for a reunion
dimmed, Beaumont underscored the immorality of St. Martin’s actions.
In May of 1846, after negotiations stalled, Beaumont reproached St. Mar-
tin for the shame he had brought him. “Now Alexis,” he condescended:
“I am sorry you now propose the same embarrassment again as a condi-
tion of your compliance with my wishes . . . you know the embarrassment
& interruption that have occurred heretofore to the prosecution of my
experiments upon you. . . . I cannot again voluntarily subject myself to
defeat & disappointment by advancing more money before I am sure of
your personal presence here & positive surrender of your services in fulfill-
ment of your engagement.”55 Beaumont’s appeals referred to contractual
engagements and advanced wages, but they also played upon Beaumont’s
“embarrassment,” “defeat,” and “disappointment.”
The kinds of inducements Beaumont offered to St. Martin if he were
to return underscored the personal nature of their attachment. Beau-
mont was often less than specific when discussing the kind and amount of
compensation he might offer St. Martin. Beaumont’s letters to St. Martin
might speak in vague terms about a “salary,” but they often closed with an
assurance that he would “do justly & liberally by you.”56 This stock nine-
teenth-century phrase captured the ambiguities of a relationship based
on both formal labor contracts and a benevolent personal paternalism:
Beaumont would “justly” fulfill his contractual obligations while maintain-
ing a “liberal” generosity and kindness. Beaumont’s rejection of certain
tactics further demonstrates his inability to think of his relationship with
St. Martin in purely formal, economic terms. Negotiations through the
54. Beaumont to St. Martin (enclosed with letter to Morrison) (ALS copy), 28 March
1846, WBC.
55. Draft from Beaumont to St. Martin, 29 May 1846, WBC.
56. Ibid. Government agents used the same phrase negotiating with plains Indians in
the 1820s. See Caleb Atwater, Remarks made on a tour to Prairie du Chien thence to Washington
City [1829] (New York: Arno Press, 1975).
Medical Research in Antebellum America 213
retired fur agent William Morrison in 1846 stalled on the issue of whether
Beaumont would advance $50 to St. Martin. St. Martin argued that he
needed an advance to get his affairs in order, but Beaumont worried that
St. Martin would renege once the money was released. Morrison, conceiv-
ably fatigued by Beaumont’s reluctance to make the deal, suggested the
doctor “tak[e] a mortgage on his farm to induce his faithfulness.”57 Beau-
mont held other mortgages and engaged in real estate speculation (so
successfully that he could have easily absorbed a $50 loss). But Beaumont
showed no enthusiasm for the plan, and it was not mentioned again in
the correspondence. His difficulties with St. Martin could not be solved
with a simple financial instrument. Beaumont wanted St. Martin’s defer-
ence and allegiance, which he suspected could not be secured through a
mortgage. Beaumont thought about St. Martin as a contractually engaged
laborer, but his actions reflected ambivalence about how his physical par-
ticipation could be secured in a market economy.
St. Martin also considered his relationship to Beaumont in terms of
labor. Like Beaumont, St. Martin moved between the language of “free”
contract labor and paternalist servitude. Letters written after 1833, part
of continued negotiations for his return, showed that St. Martin recog-
nized the validity of the outstanding 1833 articles of agreement. Mor-
rison, working on Beaumont’s behalf, reported in 1837 that St. Martin
“says that he can make no new engagement—as he has not yet finished
his [latter] one with the Doctor but would be willing to renew his engage-
ment.”58 An 1842 letter from St. Martin to Beaumont, transcribed by St.
Martin’s parish priest, also extended the possibility of returning on “the
same engagement.”59 In 1846, twelve years after they parted, Morrison
related that St. Martin had refused the advances of potential research-
ers from Montreal “upon the ground that he was bound to you and was
not his own master.”60 St. Martin’s free use of the language of contractual
engagement indicates that he, too, saw his association with Beaumont as
a kind of labor relation.
57. Samuel Beaumont forwarded Morrison’s advice to Beaumont and suggested his
cousin consider this course of action. Samuel Beaumont to William Beaumont (ALS Platts-
burgh), 21 August 1846, WBC.
58. Morrison to Beaumont (ALS Berthier), 26 April 1837, WBC. St. Martin’s offer was con-
tingent upon his family coming with him. Morrison advised Beaumont that St. Martin would
not go without the family. See also a letter from St. Martin to Beaumont reporting an offer
from the American Physiological Society: St. Martin to Beaumont, 5 June 1838, WBC.
59. St. Martin (“Alexander Martin”) to Beaumont (LS St. Thomas), 24 May 1842,
WBC.
60. Morrison to Beaumont, (LC Berthier), 20 February 1846, WBC.
214 alexa green
On some level, St. Martin understood his past and future relation-
ship to Beaumont in terms of contract employment. But like Beaumont,
St. Martin’s appeals and proposals were situated in the ambiguous area
between paternalist servitude and contract wage labor. St. Martin often
expressed his relations with the doctor in terms of benevolence and
deference. Shortly after he had left the doctor in 1834, St. Martin sent
a letter apologizing and explaining his action: “Me and my wife joins in
love to you and your mistress & all the family hoping this may find you
all in good health. I hope you wont be angry with me as I can do better at
home I am much obl[i]g[e]d to you for what you have done and if it was
in my power I should all I could for you with Pleasure. You will be good
aniff [sic, enough] to give my love to Mr. Green & his family.”61 Despite
the ostensible formality of their contract, St. Martin spoke to Beaumont in
the language of paternalism and sought understanding for his particular
circumstances. He was “obliged” and hoped that Beaumont would not be
“angry.” In mentioning the connection between their two families, St. Mar-
tin expressed the broader and less formal frame of their relationship.
St. Martin’s family would become an important theme in St. Martin’s
negotiations with Beaumont. St. Martin often raised the subject in ways
that framed Beaumont’s obligations to St. Martin’s family in terms of
employment. As early as 1827, a fur company agent advised Beaumont:
“There will be no difficulty in getting him [St. Martin] back at any reason-
able price providing you will employ his Wife!!!”62 In making this request,
St. Martin reaffirmed his understanding of his relationship to Beaumont
in terms of labor but expanded the scope of their negotiations beyond a
contract between a single worker and his employer. Beaumont did even-
tually accept work from St. Martin’s wife, Marie Joly, but the arrangement
ended with a disagreement about what St. Martin and his family were
owed. The dispute highlighted St. Martin’s tendency to see his relations
with Beaumont in terms of labor. In 1829 and 1830 at Prairie du Chien,
while St. Martin was conducting his second series of experiments, Marie
Joly washed clothing for the Beaumont household. Frontier laundry was
a demanding task, and Deborah Beaumont, with three young children,
would have welcomed the assistance. Many years later, when St. Martin
was negotiating conditions for returning to Beaumont, St. Martin com-
plained that his wife had not been paid for the work she had performed:
“My wife will be thankful to you for the balance that is owed to her for one
61. St. Martin to Beaumont (L Berthier), 26 June 1834, WBC. St. Martin may have
thought this was the end of their relationship.
62. Mathews to Beaumont, 18 August 1827, WBC.
Medical Research in Antebellum America 215
hundred and fifty doz[en] of dresses shirts & &tc that she washed for your
family—at 2/6 per dozen, and thus you know is due.”63 Most nineteenth-
century laundresses received a piece rate, but Marie Joly’s labor appears
to have been informally incorporated into the Beaumont household in
the same fashion as her husband’s.64 At the time, Marie Joly was probably
treated as an unwaged domestic servant. St. Martin’s figure of 1,800 laun-
dered items suggests that he and his wife were seeking compensation for
several years’ worth of work. With the demand for back pay, St. Martin
asked Beaumont to formally articulate Marie Joly’s status as a worker and
value her labor in cash. In making such a request, St. Martin and Marie
Joly described their past and future relationship with Beaumont in terms
of employment.
When St. Martin addressed the subject of what he and Beaumont owed
to each other, he talked about the fairness of a labor arrangement. St.
Martin’s chief complaint was that the doctor did not fulfill his obligations
as an employer. For St. Martin, it wasn’t about having meat dangled into
his orifice for hours at a time, having his diet regulated, or being “dem-
onstrated” to medical professionals: it was about fair employment prac-
tices. St. Martin, like Beaumont and his peers, referred to an existing set
of ideas and practices that told them how value could be extracted from
the body of another person. This cultural script, however, was in the pro-
cess of being rewritten. While Beaumont and St. Martin often discussed
their relationship as a formal labor contract, their obligations to each
other defined and limited by the articles of agreement, their “engage-
ment” and the protracted negotiations after 1834 mixed the language
of contractual wage labor with references to benevolent paternalism and
protection. Beaumont and St. Martin struggled to make sense of their
relationship, drawing freely from these old and new models of labor.
Beaumont expressed his disappointments in the calculating language of
the market, but his letters were also suffused with the idea that St. Martin
had failed him personally and morally. For his part, St. Martin spoke of
renewed “engagements” and uncanceled contracts, but he also assumed
that Beaumont should provide for him and his family.
63. St. Martin also pointed out that if his family had been with him in 1833–34, Beau-
mont’s experiments need not have been interrupted. St. Martin to Beaumont (ALS Berth-
ier), 6 July 1846, WBC.
64. On laundresses, see Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and
Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Chris-
tine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1982;
reprint, 1986).
216 alexa green
Labor relations provided a guide for how St. Martin’s very physical par-
ticipation in Beaumont’s research would be valued and traded. Many of
the tensions between Beaumont and St. Martin were the product of ambi-
guities generic to the market revolution. The uncertainty over whether
St. Martin would be considered an independent, contractually waged
employee or the subordinate subject of paternalist protection reflected
a larger question in antebellum labor relations. Both Beaumont and St.
Martin moved between the discourses of paternalism and contract when
arguing for what they owed to each other. In this, their relationship reveals
the small, incremental decisions and negotiations by which Americans
remade their relations to one another in a new economic world. Beau-
mont and St. Martin are reminders that the transition to “free” forms of
labor was slow, uneven, and created by individual actors. Their relation-
ship was a part and product of the market revolution.
Analyzing Beaumont and St. Martin in context suggests a wider, his-
torically sensitive view of the history of medical and research ethics. The
content and structure of their interactions bore little debt to moral phi-
losophy or specific codes of medical or scientific conduct. Their relation-
ship was a function of the social and cultural world the two men lived in,
drawing its shape from informal domestic servitude, contract labor, and
military subordination. Insofar as these models offered discourses and
practices of moral obligation, they created a de facto research ethics. What
was and was not acceptable in terms of Beaumont’s access to St. Martin’s
body was determined by the formal and informal rules governing other
working bodies.
alexa green completed her Ph.D. dissertation at the Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine, Institute for the History of Medicine. In her thesis, “The Market
Cultures of William Beaumont: Science, Medicine and Ethics in Antebellum
America” (2007), she analyzed various aspects of Beaumont’s work, including
the intercolation of domestic and scientific production, the medical market-
place of the antebellum American West, and Beaumont’s appropriation by
cookbook authors and “popular” health manuals. She is currently working
on an essay demonstrating the ways St. Martin’s labor substantively influ-
enced Beaumont’s experimental program. She can be reached via e-mail at
alexa.harcourt@gmail.com.