An alimentary voyage packed full of fun factoids shines a light on the fate of food inside us
Mary Roachs alimentary voyage is riddled with holes anatomically speaking. It starts with one and ends with another and is veritably peppered with fistulas and if that sounds like a Lakeland cooking instrument, I should warn you it isnt.
The gastric variety is an opening from the outside of the body into the stomach and, as Roach discovers, dangling things through it is something of a medical pastime. Cabbage, beef, the ears of live rabbit you name it, its been suspended through some creatures fistula and whipped out to examine the effect of the environment it encounters. Indeed Alexis St Martin, a fur trapper in the early 19th century, experienced such experiments first hand when an unfortunate encounter with a shotgun led to an arguably even more unfortunate encounter with a surgeon named William Beaumont who became somewhat fixated with his resulting fistula. Not content with fishing about using bits of string, Roach reveals he went a step further. For the out-of-body digestion experiments, Beaumont had St Martin hold vials of gastric juice under his arms to simulate the temperature and movements of the stomach.
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