Friday, I’m having coffee with a bunch of scientists.  These people are all freaking brilliant.  Let’s see---there’s Dr. Cyclotron who wanted to play with an atom smasher so he built one in the basement and every time he fires it up he warns people by hollering “Fore, to the 26^th power!”  

There’s Dr. Bashful, a chemist who likes to talk about left-handed and right-handed iodine atoms. Next to me is Dr. Loggerhead, a biologist who is preparing to study what disastrous things happen to crabs when the sea temperature changes by a degree (and it is NOT expected to be pretty!)  Dr. Ciderman is a computer scientist who does things with computers that I can’t even describe, let alone understand.  Dr. Routemeister is over there talking to him about perfect numbers, and logarithmic extractions in exelsis Deo or something. There is Dr. Dancer who reported after she had spent 6 weeks in a tent at the South Pole while on an expedition looking for meteorites, “And, it was the first time I’d ever been camping!”

Anyway, here I am, engrossed in a highly intellectual conversation with these brilliant scientists in which my role is to serve as the conversational equivalent of a battered hockey puck during an NHL All Star Team practice.  Dr. Bashful, the chemist, starts telling about the cattle he has seen at agricultural universities in which they install portholes so the scientists can look into their multi-chambered stomachs and watch food digest, just for kicks.

It seems that everyone in the group has seen bovines with windows in their future flank steaks except for me, since they all start telling stories about their experiences of peering into the sloppy wet alfalfine acidic guts of cows, bulls and steers.

So, afterward, it made me wonder if having such a window could have a more practical use. 

I recalled as a student learning of the misery of Alexis St. Martin, the French-Canadian voyageur who was unfortunately shot in the abdomen at close range with a musket. The poor man was taken to Dr. William Beaumont on Mackinac Island.  This was 1822.  The wound never properly healed, so Alexis wasn’t able to return to work in his canoe and Beaumont hired him as a handyman to chop wood and shovel snow. He also began to perform experiments wherein he would insert different foods (oysters seemed to be a favorite) directly into the hole in St. Martin’s stomach and thus learned and reported how the middle-digestive system worked. I’m guessing that Beaumont dropped stuff into the open hole on a string, left it there for a few minutes or hours, and then pulled it back out again for a close look. These experiments took place over many years.

(Beaumont died in 1853 after slipping on the ice on a stair step and hitting his head.  One may wonder if his handyman, St. Martin, may have deliberately missed shoveling a step to get even, but, no, St. Martin had a perfect alibi as Beaumont was in St. Louis and St. Martin in Washington, D. C.)

Anyway, back to my story:  If one could put food INTO a hole in the stomach, well…..          

The Portholed Cow

Said the cow from her home in the lab
“My stomachs sure hurt from what I ate!—
Was it the sushi, or maybe the crab!
I’ll just open the sash and defenestrate.”

                                              © by Jim Whitehouse

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