Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St.

Martin, and
Medical Research in Antebellum America

Alexa Green

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 84, Number 2, Summer 2010,

pp. 193-216 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.0.0341

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/387829

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

Summary: Analyzing William Beaumont’s relationship with his experimental

subject, Alexis St. Martin, this article demonstrates how the “research ethics” of
antebellum America were predicated on models of employment, servitude, and
labor. The association between Beaumont and St. Martin drew from and was
understood in terms of the ideas and practices of contract labor, informal domestic
servitude, indentures, and military service. Beaumont and St. Martin lived through
an important period of transition in which personal master–servant relations
existed alongside the “free” contract labor of market capitalism. Their relationship
reflected and helped constitute important developments in nineteenth-century
American labor history.

Keywords: medical ethics, research ethics, labor relations, contracts, servitude,

market revolution, human experimentation

William Beaumont’s experiments in gastric physiology are among the

most widely known and provocative episodes in the history of Ameri-
can medicine. Between 1825 and 1834, Beaumont conducted a series
of experiments with a single human subject, Alexis St. Martin, a man in
whom a gunshot wound had created a permanent extra orifice leading
directly into his stomach. Well into the twentieth century, Beaumont was
invoked as an exemplar of American ingenuity and medical intellect.
Introductory physiology textbooks routinely mention Beaumont’s preco-
cious experimentalism as an important precursor to modern biological
science. And while his experiments with St. Martin are often invoked in

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.

193  Bull. Hist. Med., 2010, 84  : 193–216

194 alexa green

histories of medical and research ethics, the significance and content of

their relationship remain underexamined.
Beaumont’s experiments were lengthy, uncomfortable, and sometimes
painful intrusions onto St. Martin’s body. His research occurred outside
the institutional structures of the laboratory, the research hospital, and
the modern clinical trial. No formal code of research ethics existed to
guide interactions between an experimenter and a human subject in the
antebellum period. In this essay, I revisit Beaumont’s experimental work
to ask how relations between a researcher and a human subject are shaped
in the absence of formal research ethics. My goal is to show how Beau-
mont and St. Martin thought about, constructed, and lived their peculiar
arrangement and to describe the historically specific rules, formal and
informal, that guided human experimentation and medical research. I
argue that human experimentation in early-nineteenth-century America
took its shape from the ideas and practices of labor. The informal eth-
ics of human experimentation, the unwritten rules that governed what
was and was not acceptable in Beaumont’s use of a human subject, were
predicated on a labor relationship.
Formal codes of medical ethics existed in the antebellum period,
most notably those of Thomas Percival and John Gregory, but these held
very little sway in everyday clinical encounters. Doctor–patient relation-
ships largely drew their shape from other areas of life. Historians of the
period have shown how interactions could be informally guided by clini-
cal pragmatism, genteel civility, or political ideology.1 Ethics, in this view,
is not limited to the formal promulgation of moral values by a defined
community but is, rather, an emergent property of social interaction.2 I

1. Martin S. Pernick, “The Patient’s Role in Medical Decisionmaking: A Social History

of Informed Consent in Medical Therapy,” in Making Health Care Decisions: Studies on the
Foundations of Informed Consent, President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in
Medicine, vol. III (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 1–35; Randall
Baldwin Clark, “Bleedings, Purges, and Vomits: Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Republican Medicine,
the Bilious Remitting Yellow-Fever Epidemic of 1793, and the Non-Origin of the Law of
Informed Consent,” J. Contemp. Health Law Policy, 2008, 24  : 209–50; and Kathleen Powderly,
“Patient Consent and Negotiation in the Brooklyn Gynecological Practice of Alexander J.
C. Skene, 1863–1900,” J. Med. Philos., 2000, 25  : 12–27.
2. Robert Baker, “Deciphering Percival’s Code,” in The Codification of Medical Morality: His-
torical and Philosophical Studies of the Formalization of Western Medical Morality in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Robert Baker, Dorothy Porter, and Roy Porter (Boston: Kluwer, 1993),
pp. 179–212; Baker, Porter, and Porter, eds., The American Medical Ethics Revolution: How the
AMA’s Code of Ethics Has Transformed Physicians’ Relationships to Patients, Professionals, and Society
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Cf. Jay Katz, The Silent World of Doctor and
Patient (New York: Free Press, 1984); Chauncey Leake, ed., Percival’s Medical Ethics (Baltimore:
Williams and Wilkins, 1927); Ruth Faden, Tom Beauchamp, and Nancy King, A History and
Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Michael McVaugh,
 Medical Research in Antebellum America 195

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

concern in 1979 in an essay in which he intended to explain Beaumont’s

“indifference to ethics” and understand “why he and his reviewers dis-
played so little concern for the rights of St. Martin.”8 Numbers showed that
Beaumont’s actions were no more or less egregious than those of his con-
temporary scientists and physicians, implied that historical circumstances
limited Beaumont’s realization of a more enlightened arrangement, and
concluded that Beaumont “may not have been a pioneer in the history
of bioethics, but neither was he a villain.”9 In what follows, I revise and
expand Numbers’s approach to analyze the historical circumstances of
the early nineteenth century as influences in their own right rather than
impediments to modern systems of ethics. Rather than judge Beaumont’s
behavior as virtuous or villainous, my intention is to analyze the content
and nature of his association with St. Martin. I ask not why Beaumont
failed to recognize St. Martin’s rights, but what his perceived rights were
and where they came from.
In arguing for the importance of labor relations in Beaumont’s asso-
ciation with St. Martin, I expand on a suggestion made many years ago
by Estelle Brodman. In her introduction to a 1981 edition of Beaumont’s
monograph Experiments and Observations, she noted in passing that his rela-
tions with St. Martin may have been strained because the two men under-
stood servitude differently.10 Unfortunately, Brodman did not develop this
idea further. I follow and refine Brodman’s suggestion but show how St.
Martin and Beaumont shared a vision of right relations between master
and servant, employer and employee. Their relationship was complicated,
in part, because patterns of labor were in flux.
By understanding the deep influence of labor relations on Beaumont
and St. Martin, I aim to connect the history of medicine to the antebel-

8. Ronald L. Numbers, “William Beaumont and the Ethics of Human Experimentation,”

J. Hist. Biol., 1979, 12  : 113–35, quotations on pp. 133–35. By the late twentieth century, his-
torians generally invoked the absence of institutional structures to explain what they saw
as Beaumont’s failings relative to modern standards of informed consent and respect for
persons. Walter J. Friedlander, “The Evolution of Informed Consent in American Medicine,”
Perspect. Biol. Med., 1995, 38  : 498–510; Reginald Horsman, Frontier Doctor: William Beaumont,
America’s First Great Medical Scientist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996); and
Cynthia DeHaven Pitcock, “The Career of William Beaumont, 1785–1853: Science and the
Self-Made Man in America” (Ph.D. diss., Memphis State University, 1985).
9. Numbers, “William Beaumont” (n. 8), p. 135.
10. Estelle Brodman, “William Beaumont, the Individual [Introduction],” in William
Beaumont, a Pioneer American Physiologist (St. Louis, Mo.: The C. V. Mosby Company, 1981),
pp. 3–18, esp. p. 7.
 Medical Research in Antebellum America 197

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

the emergence of a new discourse of employment that was markedly more

status based and personal than what had come before. Tomlins argues
that what had previously been considered free-market labor contracts
were increasingly conflated with personal domestic service arrangements,
adding a new layer of paternalism to employment relations.14 Throughout
this period, men like Beaumont and St. Martin reworked and reimagined
their relations to one another under a new economic system. Science and
medicine were but one more arena in which Americans made the social
relations of capitalism.

Beaumont was a surgeon in the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Mackinaw

in the Northwest Territory when, in 1822, he was called to the scene of
an accident in which a young voyageur, Alexis St. Martin, was shot with a
musket. Beaumont treated St. Martin’s injuries, but the wound healed to
form a gastric fistula, a permanent opening into the interior of St. Mar-
tin’s stomach. Between 1825 and 1833 Beaumont conducted four series
of experiments using St. Martin’s extraordinary orifice, investigating the
relatively mundane question of the digestibility of different foods as well
larger questions of whether digestion was a chemical or “vital” process.
Over the course of several years, Beaumont regulated St. Martin’s diet,
extracted partially digested food and “pure” gastric juice through the fis-
tula, inserted thermometers, and suspended different kinds of food on
a string into St. Martin’s stomach. Beaumont’s physiological researches
were compiled and published in an 1833 monograph, Experiments and
Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion.15 The book
was widely read throughout the middle and late nineteenth century and
cited by cookbook authors as well as eminent scientists such as Claude
Bernard.16 Beaumont died in 1853 after years of private medical practice
in St. Louis, Missouri.
At the time of his injury in the spring of 1822, Alexis St. Martin was an
eighteen-year-old employed in the fur trade. Like other French Canadians
in the northeast, St. Martin participated in the American market culture
while remaining part of a distinct and subordinate ethnic minority.17 In
1821 he, like so many other young men from the area surrounding the

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

In addition to the domestic tasks described in Experiments and Observations,

Beaumont’s notebooks from this period referred to St. Martin “mowing
in the fields.”23 Beaumont was candid in recounting the hard work per-
formed by St. Martin, in part because it demonstrated his subject’s physi-
cal health and normality, but his comments also confirm the centrality

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

of labor to St. Martin’s status. Despite his involvement in Beaumont’s

experimental research, St. Martin’s status and daily activities revolved
around physical labor.
In practice, the informal relationship between St. Martin and Beau-
mont drew its shape from contemporary labor arrangements. While
initially based on the ideas and practices of informal domestic labor,
their association took on new levels of formality in the late 1820s and
early 1830s with the use of personal contracts and the intervention of
the American Fur Company and U.S. Army. Fur Company recruitment,
enlistment, and personal contracts evoked a labor arrangement nominally
free from the paternalism and deference of domestic servitude. After the
early 1830s, Beaumont and St. Martin were increasingly likely to discuss
their arrangement as a formal market transaction. But this language of
contract employment operated alongside older, established assumptions
about what Beaumont and St. Martin owed to each other as master and
servant. Between 1834 and 1852, both men reinterpreted and recast their
relationship as a mix of paternalist and contractual labor relations.

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-

24. “Articles of Agreement,” 1832, WBC.

25. It may be possible to trace concepts of benevolence and respect for persons through
the nineteenth century into current research ethics, but to the extent that Beaumont treated
St. Martin as an autonomous self-determining individual or extended benevolence toward
him, he did so because this was how one handled employment relations. Although it is
beyond the scope of this paper, and not necessarily desirable in terms of understanding
the nineteenth century on its own terms, it would be interesting to ask whether contempo-
rary medical ethics have been shaped by labor relations. See, for example, Robert Helms’s
“occupational jobzine” Guinea Pig Zero: An Anthology of the Journal for Human Research Subjects
(New Orleans, La.: Garrett County Press, 2002).
202 alexa green

tin and Beaumont, as for their antebellum contemporaries, these articles

of agreement resembled nothing so much as an employment contract.
For Beaumont, the articles of agreement probably most resembled
formal documents for securing household servants in the antebellum
period. Despite the mention of “Philosophical or medical experiments”
and St. Martin’s “aperture,” the articles of agreement made clear that
St. Martin’s status and duties were those of a servant. Like other labor
contracts from the early antebellum period, they attempted to formally
describe and abstract servitude as a market commodity. The 1832 version
stated that St. Martin
doth covenant promise and agree . . . for and during the full term of one year
. . . [to] serve, abide and continue with the said William Beaumont . . . [,] his
covenant Servant . . . [to] exercise& employ himself in and do & perform such
service & business matters & things [whatever] as the said William shall from
time to time order direct and appoint to and for the most profit & advantage
of the said William and likewise be just and true & faithful to the said William
in all things & in all respects.26

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.

26. “Articles of Agreement,” 1832, WBC.

27. Ibid.
 Medical Research in Antebellum America 203

(Significantly, in his continual references to St. Martin as a “boy” or

“lad,” Beaumont conveyed his subject’s youth and subordination.) The
boilerplate indenture contract used through the 1830s by the New York
Almshouse to bind young men to masters read:
That [the apprentice] . . . doth voluntarily, and of his own free will and accord,
put himself Apprentice to [the master]. . . . During all which time, the said
apprentice his master shall faithfully serve, his secrets keep, his lawful com-
mands every where readily obey: He shall do no damage to his said master
nor see it done by others, without letting or giving notice thereof to his said
master. [. . .] He shall not absent himself day or night from his said master’s
service, without his leave; nor haunt ale-houses, taverns, nor play-houses; but
in all things behave himself as a faithful Apprentice ought to do, during the
said term.28

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

charges. St. Martin’s subordination to Beaumont, and the doctor’s free

access to St. Martin’s body, made sense in terms of nineteenth-century
ideas about the power masters had over their servants.
The articles of agreement were also structurally similar to indenture
contracts used to bind foreign-born adults in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. In the late 1820s, for example, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
Company used indenture contracts with adult male laborers imported
from England that directed the bound men to “faithfully serve the Presi-
dent and Directors [of the company]” in exchange for wages, passage to
America, and “Meat, Drink, Washing and Lodging.”31 Like apprenticeship
indentures and the articles of agreement, the contracts used by the Chesa-
peake and Ohio Canal Company articulated the personal subordination
of the laborer and the in-kind responsibilities of the employer. Although
indented service was becoming increasingly rare for adult white males,
St. Martin’s youth, his nationality, and his ethnicity suggested indentured
service as a model for his employment. The contracts between Beaumont
and St. Martin thus paralleled service indentures from the same period,
but they also echoed employment contracts used with seasonal contract
labor.
For St. Martin, especially, the articles of agreement would have resem-
bled contracts used in the fur trade. The formal agreements between
Beaumont and St. Martin resembled, in tone and structure, the contracts
St. Martin would have signed as a voyageur in 1821 and 1826. Voyageurs
for large companies signed preprinted French contacts for periods of
service from one to five years, attaching themselves to a managerial repre-
sentative who accompanied them on their journey.32 A boilerplate contract
used by the American Fur Company in the 1820s read:
Before a Notary residing at the post of Michilimakinac, Undersigned; Was
Present [name of voyageur] who has voluntarily engaged and doth bind him-

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

self by these Presents to M[name of bourgeois] . . . to serve, obey and execute

faithfully all that the said Sieur [Bourgeois] or any other person represent-
ing him to whom he may transport the present Engagement, commends him
lawfully and honestly; to do [his] profit, to avoid anything to his damage, and
to inform him of it if it come to his knowledge, and generally to do all that a
good [Winterer] ought and is obliged to do; without power to make any par-
ticular trade, to absent himself, or to quit the said service, under pain of the
Ordinances, and of loss of wages.

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

in the articles of agreement. He had signed his “X” to the bottom of a

document binding himself to a man of higher social status before. He
would have understood his contract with Beaumont in relation to the
contracts he signed as a voyageur.
The articles of agreement between Beaumont and St. Martin formal-
ized their relationship in the model of a labor contract. They reflected an
understanding between Beaumont and St. Martin based in nineteenth-
century labor relations rather than a twentieth-century conception of
respect for persons. The formal medical ethics of the period, as well as
the informal ethics that governed therapeutic encounters, seemed to have
played, at best, a secondary role. But insofar as they articulated a mutually
agreeable set of guidelines, the personal contracts between Beaumont and
St. Martin reflected a kind of research ethics. The documents had moral
content, but the “ethics” they described were not derived from moral
philosophy or a specifically medical milieu. Beaumont, St. Martin, or any
early-nineteenth-century American would have read the contracts as an
expression of right relations between an employer and an employee.
St. Martin was also bound to Beaumont as a military subordinate, offer-
ing another formal model of a labor relationship. In the winter of 1832–
33, Beaumont arranged for St. Martin to be enlisted in the U.S. Army as
an “orderly” for a period of five years. St. Martin was granted the rank of
sergeant, for which he received a monthly salary of $12 plus 10 cents a
day for subsistence.34 Despite his rank, St. Martin essentially functioned
as a personal servant to Beaumont during this period, a perquisite the
army routinely provided officers. St. Martin’s enlistment provided Beau-
mont with free access to St. Martin’s body, control over his movements,
and a subsidy for his support. Although specifically designed to facilitate
scientific research, the formal involvement of the U.S. Army underscores
the extent to which relations between Beaumont and St. Martin were
understood and experienced in terms of labor. The enlisted ranks of the
early-nineteenth-century Army were filled with men who, like St. Martin,
had come to the United States to find work. Like engaging to be a voya-
geur, enlistees signed contracts for periods of service (three to five years
was common), and like fur trading companies, the army faced a perpet-
ual crisis of desertion. Enlisted men spent much more time at common
labor than at drills or fighting. Especially on frontier posts, the army used
enlisted men as a labor pool to construct buildings, grow food, chop wood,
and clear land. The army had a distinctive administrative structure, but
the experience of an enlisted man was essentially continuous with that of

34. “Descriptive Roll,” March 1833, WBC.

 Medical Research in Antebellum America 207

a common laborer.35 Although his everyday duties were still circumscribed

by his personal attendance and servitude, enlistment was another kind of
contractual employment that bound St. Martin to Beaumont.36
The formal and informal rules that shaped the relationship between
Beaumont and St. Martin were drawn from the ideas and practices of
military labor, fur trade engagements, and domestic servitude. In the
later years of their association, Beaumont used formal legal and institu-
tional means to control and secure St. Martin, but relations between the
two men were never entirely reducible to a legal contract or the formal
expectations of military service. The obligations of a servant, soldier, and
voyageur were themselves difficult to abstract. Beaumont and St. Martin
created their relationship out of these ambiguously contractual labor
arrangements. What they believed they owed to each other and what they
considered acceptable in the course of scientific research, the “ethics” of
their situation, derived from their status as master and servant, employer
and employee, and officer and soldier.

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

Beaumont continued to provide medical treatment, but St. Martin’s

status within the household was defined by his “service.” In the years
between and after Beaumont’s experiments, when St. Martin was living
in Canada, Beaumont pointedly used the language of servitude to express
his dissatisfaction with St. Martin’s absence. In his first published report
of his experiments with St. Martin, Beaumont claimed that his scientific
work would have continued “had not the fellow absconded from my ser-
vice.”42 In a personal letter from the same period, Beaumont combined
references to St. Martin’s “service” with physiological experimentation,
complaining, “he has ran away absconded & gone to Canada. . . . I very
much fear I shall not be able to recover possession of him again—. He was
unwilling to be experimented upon, though it caused him but little pain
or distress.”43 Referring to St. Martin as a “boy” who had “absconded” or
“run away,” Beaumont expressed his relationship to St. Martin in terms
of domestic subordination.
Beaumont described St. Martin’s labor obligations in a way that mixed
paternalist forms of protection with free contract employment. In cor-
respondence from the 1820s until his death in 1852, Beaumont continu-
ally referred to “engaging” St. Martin, and often complained about the
“high wages” and “salary” he had paid his subject. After St. Martin left for
good, Beaumont described his claims in the terms of a labor contract. In
an 1837 letter to the Boston Physiological Society, Beaumont described
St. Martin as “engaged to me & . . . under contract.”44 Almost ten years
later, Beaumont complained to an intermediary that St. Martin had
“fail[ed] to fulfill his engagements for which . . . money was advanced.”45
In a letter to his own son, who was sent to Canada in an effort to retrieve
St. Martin, Beaumont explicitly stated that St. Martin should be treated
as a “private . . . servant.”46 This attitude, of moral indignation and legal
right over a departed servant, was entirely common among antebellum
heads of household.47 Beaumont thought about their agreement as a
labor arrangement, and of St. Martin as a contractually engaged subor-
dinate. When Beaumont talked about what the two owed to each other,
he talked in the language of employment. For Beaumont, the assumed

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

range of acceptable behavior in the relationship came from St. Martin’s

status as a laborer.
Beaumont’s response to St. Martin’s departure reflected his willingness
to mobilize the tactics and language of contract labor. As early as 1827,
Beaumont solicited the help of fur trade agents to return St. Martin for
additional experiments. Later efforts were similarly embedded in the
employment and business structures of the fur trade. In the early spring
of 1839, as the American Fur Company was preparing equipment and men
for the coming season, Beaumont wrote directly to the company’s head-
quarters in New York City: “I am anxious again to possess myself of Alexis
St. Martin for the particular purpose for which he formerly engaged to
me. I know of no way so surely calculated to affect [sic] it as through your
kind agency influence and agency if you will take the trouble to do so—as
has kindly been done once before, in 1828.”48 Beaumont asked represen-
tative of the American Fur Company “to engage [St. Martin] on the best
terms [procurable] to be brought on with the voyageurs for your trade
& transferred to me.”49 The head of operations in New York City agreed
to help and enlisted the assistance of Vallee, Boyer & Co. in Montreal, a
firm that had for several years arranged the construction of canoes and
the hiring of boatmen and other laborers for the American Fur Company.
Correspondence between the American Fur Company and Vallee, Boyer
& Co., more broadly concerned with the problems and machinations of
the fur trade, included an agreement to help “engag[e] Mr. Alexis St.
Martin for Dr. Beaumont.”50 The maneuvering to recover St. Martin was
literally intercalated with the daily business practices of the fur trade. In
using these networks and logistical technologies, Beaumont evoked a
relationship with St. Martin analogous to that between a fur agent and
a voyageur. Years later, in 1846, Beaumont continued to rely on formal

48. Draft from Beaumont to Ramsey Crooks, 23 January 1839, WBC.

49. Ibid.
50. The primary focus of these letters was logistical and business issues: exchange rates
in Montreal, problems obtaining bark suitable for canoes, the progress of a particular
canoe-maker, orders for consumer goods, the status of a debtor’s note, prospects for hiring
voyageurs. Vallee, Boyer, & Co. arranged the details for American Fur Company vessels out
of the Montreal/St. Lawrence region. They sent standard boilerplate employment contracts
back to Crooks in New York for approval, but handled all the employment details in the field.
In tone and structure, the negotiations for St. Martin resemble protracted correspondence
between Crooks and Vallee, Boyer, & Co. in the mid-1830s about how difficult it is to hire
coopers and boatmen. They complain about similar problems of drinking, untrustworthi-
ness, spending of advances, and desertion. Vallee, Boyer, & Co. to Crooks, 3 April 1839; and
Crooks to Vallee, Boyer, & Co., 27 March 1839, Papers of the American Fur Co., L.B.C. 9:
pp. 245–46, no. 5877, New York Historical Society.
 Medical Research in Antebellum America 211

engagements in his efforts to have St. Martin return. When Beaumont

sent his cousin Samuel and son Israel to Canada to retrieve St. Martin, he
gave explicit instructions to have a “written engagement made” in order
to “control him.”51 Throughout these negotiations, Beaumont relied on
the language and practices of contract employment.
Beaumont’s letters reflected an understanding of St. Martin as a
freely engaged contract worker, but they also expressed a deeply moral
and extracontractual vision of relations between an employer and an
employee. His private remarks were frequently tinged with the idea that
his subject had failed him morally and personally. A long letter to his
friend Surgeon General Lovell, written in 1834 a few months after St.
Martin left for Canada, bristles with indignation at St. Martin’s behavior:
“Here we have [his true] character—His object was to induce me to come
into Canada after him, & [. . .] my inability there to inforce [sic] the con-
ditions of his indenture to any useful purpose, intended & expected to
take advantage of my anxiety to extort a [much] higher salary[.] I know
well his dispositions & his ugliness. . . .”52
Beaumont confided to Lovell that he would wait until St. Martin had
“spent all the money I advanced him to provide for his family for the year
ensuing, become miserably poor & write and again & be willing to recant
his villainous obstinacy & ugliness & then I shall be able to regain pos-
session of him again.”53 On one hand, Beaumont spoke in the abstract
terms of the market, lamenting his inability to enforce the “indenture”
and anticipating demands for a “higher salary.” But on the other hand,
Beaumont stressed St. Martin’s moral failings, referring to his “villainous
obstinacy & ugliness” and suggesting his actions were deliberately calcu-
lated to exploit Beaumont’s “anxiety.” In deploying the authority of con-
tract employment while expressing indignation at St. Martin’s perceived
ingratitude and moral failings, Beaumont’s letter expressed his ambigu-
ous relationship with St. Martin.
The petitions Beaumont made directly to St. Martin were filled with
the language of paternalism, deference, and morality. Beaumont sug-
gested that St. Martin’s prosperity depended not only on his willingness
to fulfill his contracts but on his moral state. In March of 1846, Beaumont
was pleased to learn that St. Martin had stopped drinking and would
consider traveling to St. Louis for additional experiments. He wrote: “I

51. William Beaumont to Israel Beaumont (ALS), dated 1846, WBC.

52. Draft from Beaumont to ( Joseph Lovell?), 31 July 1834, WBC. It is questionable
whether the “indenture” would have been legally enforceable, even if St. Martin had been
in the United States. See Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor (n. 30).
53. Draft from Beaumont to ( Joseph Lovell?) (n. 51).
212 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.