Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/170

 BEARDSLEY

BEAUMONT

note, although the facts of his life are scanty. He was born in Stratford, Connecticut, in 174S, and became a druggist and physician, and practised in Southington, Connecticut, as early as 1778, so far as health would permit. Two years later he appears to have removed to Hartford. An advertisement of his firm, Beardsley and Hopkins, is to be found in the "Connecticut Courant" for June 26, 1781. In it we learn his drug store was sit- uated "a few rods east of the Court House." In 1782 he removed to New Haven, where he had a similar store on Chapel Street, between Church and Orange Streets. At the time of his death, in 1790, from consumption, he had taken his brother-in-law in partnership with him.

He was one of the original members of the New Haven County Medical Associa- tion, and served on the committees of correspondence and examination. In April, 178S, he reported a case of "scirrhus in the pylorus of an infant," which was the first case on record of congenital hypertrophy of the pylorus in an infant. It was printed with the papers of the society, which appeared in their transactions entitled: "Cases and Obser- vations." In this paper Beardsley noted practically every feature of the disease we now know. He had attended the patient for three years at Southington, and when her death, at the age of five years, " closed the painful and melancholy scene" he performed the autopsy. He speaks of the "constant puking," which was first noted during the first week of life. Every thing in the shape of food, the child took was almost instantaneously rejected and very little changed. The feces were small in quantity. He com- ments upon the leanness and wizened old look of the child, and states he had "pronounced a scirrhosity in the pylorus months before the child's death, "although he first attributed the condition to a deficiency of bile and gastric juices joined with a morbid relaxation of the stomach. Unfortunately, Beardsley did not know of the child's death "until the

second day after it took place. This late period, the almost intolerable stench, and the impatience of the people who had collected for the funeral, prevented so thorough an examination of the body as might otherwise have been made." At the autopsy Beardsley noted that the stomach was unusually large and dis- tended. "The pylorus was invested with a hard compact substance or scirrhosity, which so completely obstructed the passage into the duodenum as to admit with the greatest difficulty the finest fluid. He concludes, "the necessity of interring the body that evening put a stop to any further examination," and so forbade a more particular and accurate description of this very "singular case."

W. R. S.

. H., N. H. Colony Hist. Soc. Papers' ii, 59-G1. Beardsley's paper, above re- ferred to, was reprinted by Dr. Osier in Archives of Pediatrics, xx, 1903, as the volume." Cases and Observations," is so extremely scarce.

Beaumont, William (1785-1S53).

William Beaumont, surgeon and phy- siologist, was born at Lebanon, Connecti- cut, November 21, 1785, son of Samuel Beaumont, a Puritan New England farmer. His early education was such as to qualify him on attaining his majority for teaching school at Champlain, Clinton County, New York. At the same time he began to study medicine with Dr. Seth Pomeroy of Champlain, New York, and continued it with Dr. Benjamin Chandler of St. Albans, Vermont. He secured a license to practise from the Third Medical Society of Vermont, but on December 2,

1812, enlisted as surgeon's mate in the Sixteenth Regiment Infantry, United States Army. During April and May,

1813, he saw something of war surgery at the taking of York (now Toronto) where the retreating English exploded hundreds of barrels of powder under the feet of the advancing Americans, at the storming of Fort George May 27, 1813, and at the battle of Plattsburg, New York Septem- ber 11, 1813. During the latter the physicians were compelled to pass and