Hole-y Cow
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. See? Yep. Hey there, Lulu here. Today we have a story about...

A cow. Only, it is a cow unlike any you have ever seen before. That is all I'm going to say, and I'll just move out of the way and hand it off to OG Radio Lab hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krowich. Here we go. Hello. Hello.

We're going to start this show today with Mary Roach. Hey! Tim here. Hi, Tim. Hey, let me see if I can... Mary is one of our favorite authors, mostly because she kind of writes about stuff that's... Yucky. Gross. I'm the kind of person, if I find myself in an operating room for whatever I'm reporting on, I'm the kind of person where they'll be like, miserable.

Ms. Roach, you need to step back. Your head is actually inside the body cavity. And for her latest book? Called Gulp. She got really, really into and inside cows. Yeah, the fistulated cows that the agricultural schools have. And what's a fistulated cow? A fistula is an irregular anatomical passageway. And a fistulated cow has a hole right in its side. Sort of a

So that you can actually stick your hand into its side and reach all the way down. To the stomach. This is a living cow, right? It's a moving... This is a live cow. And you've done this? Yeah, it was. It was this amazing... Because really, you know, a cow is... She did it at the University of California, Davis. You're just... You're standing there sort of normally. And for some reason, I've worn...

a skirt and kitten heels. And my hosts are wearing manure-encrusted muck boots. And it's a source of great entertainment that I'm here. And it's packed really tightly. You got to really work your arm. The guy I was with, Ed DePeters, he's like, no, keep going, keep going. I'm like, I don't know, Ed. I'm not sure, really. Go further in? Yeah, keep going, keep going. And I'm literally up to my shoulder inside this cow.

I so want to do that. Where are you guys? We're in New York. Yeah, I know where there's one out there. I can get you a fistulated cow. You want to walk them down towards the barn and I'll go get the group? All right. I didn't actually get to do it, unfortunately, but we sent our producer, Tim Howard, out to Rutgers University. Come on in closer. Where a bunch of high schoolers had come to see Lily, the fistulated cow. Okay, let's give it a go. I'm going to pop the cork. All right.

Did he say cork? Yeah. You have to uncork the hole in the cow. See all the steam coming out? Ready? All right. This is Tim reaching his hand in. Go straight across the top to the far side. Okay. Oh, my God. It's powerful in there. Oh, God. I mean, I was a little worried it was going to break my hand. You mean like pressure? Yeah.

It's a very muscular organ. It's squeezing my arm. Mixing and... Wow, I can feel the side of the stomach pushing against me. Squeezing and contracting and... Wow. It's really squeezing. It's groping you back. I'm stuck. So I'm just going to try to go a little bit deeper. And it's hot. It's steamy. It's bubbly. It's physical. It's very...

Yeah. And she is so calm right now. I can't believe it. The cow's bored, and I've got this look on my face like I've seen God or something. I'm like, whoa! Mary says that for all her times in morgues and all the places she's been, this one was really different. It was the expression I was wearing I'm sure I've never had cause to use. And here's why.

If you think about it, the stomach is a center of magical transformation. That is Fred Kaufman, who wrote a whole book about the stomach. You take something outside of your body, you put it in your body, and it turns into you. So it's like this conduit between what's outside you

And what's inside? The other thing that's weird is that the human body is a torus. We're donuts. We've got a hole going through the middle of us, all the way through us. So what seems to be inside us, what seems to be inside our stomach, actually is always outside us. Oh, this is getting so deep.

You don't like the doors? No, I think it's great. I think I'll go with it. Because I was thinking we could start that way. Because that's what we're kind of doing this hour. We're going to take this thing that's deep inside us. And turn it inside out. Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krowich. This is Radiolab. And today, guts. That mystery that lies between our mouth. And our butts. We are these sacks of guts.

And these skeletons, and we walk around, and we never even see them. And for centuries, nobody really knew what's going on in there. But then something happened that opened up a window. Yeah. Do you want to start back at the beginning of it? Yeah, let's once upon a time it. Okay.

So, once upon a time, it all begins. And when is this? They first met in 1822. Once upon a time in 1822, there was a guy named William Beaumont. William Beaumont is a farm boy from Lebanon, Connecticut, five brothers and six sisters. And William clearly is the smart one. He was the one with the big dreams.

So at an early age, he leaves home and gets himself a job as a doctor. An army doctor. Up north. At Fort Mackinac, which is this, it's a trading post, basically. So Beaumont, he has a little doctor's office at the top of this hill. And at the bottom, there's a general store. One day. June 6th, 1822. Normal morning. All the fur traders come in and are unloading and loading. Getting their coffee, salted meat. Supplies to go out. Traps and fur. When all of a sudden, boom!

Right outside the shop. Somebody's gun went off. Somebody calls Beaumont. Beaumont dashes out the door. Runs down the hill. Finds this guy. This 18-year-old kid. Really in bad shape. He's a big guy. Muscular. But he's covered in blood. And he has a hole right below his ribcage. About the size of the palm of a grown man's hand. This is what Beaumont sees when he shows up. This is what Beaumont sees. And the other thing Beaumont sees is food.

coming out of his stomach. Meat and bread and coffee. Yeah. Basically the remnants of his breakfast spilled out. On the ground, right in front of him. You can kind of see the gears turning in Beaumont's head as if he's thinking, well, there it is. Digestion in action. Which was kind of disgusting, but it was also something of a revelation because in 1822, the stomach was an area of mystery.

Just like today we're aware the brain is an area of mystery. And for centuries, people believed that the stomach, more broadly the gut,

was in a very real way the center of our beings. Yes, in Puritan times, the bowels are the seat of human sympathy. You know, where our deepest feelings come from. If you have bowels for somebody, that means you sympathize with them. Oh, is that something people would say? Absolutely. Oh, we should bring that term back. That's very interesting. Yeah, I have bowels for you. Point is, medical science was pretty fuzzy in what happens down there. I mean, they knew it was important, but they had no idea how it worked. Like, how does food work?

us. Nobody understood it. Because they can't see. You can't directly observe it without opening the person up. But here was a guy open right up. But of course, Beaumont is a doctor, so he's like, wait, I've got to save this guy. So he starts sewing him up frantically. Pretty sure this fellow's not going to make it. And he was surprised that two days later the guy was alive.

Really surprised. And as the months passed, this kid... St. Martin. That was his name, Alexis St. Martin. He gets better, but... A year later, he still has this hole in his stomach. The hole never closes. What happened is he grew a fistula. Just like the cow we talked about earlier, except in this case, he didn't have a cork where he was wounded. He had a flap of skin covering the hole. If you wanted to, you could just pull back the flap and look inside. And we don't know if Beaumont left it that way on purpose...

What we do know is that he sees an opportunity. To make the body give up its secrets. He sees he's got something that nobody else has. Maybe he even thinks. This man could be my ticket out of being a lowly Fort Mackinac doctor. So Beaumont kind of hires him as a man around his house. As a manservant. You know, he said, oh, it was a charitable thing. I wanted to help him. Yeah, because it couldn't work. And I'm thinking, oh, maybe, maybe not. And so about a year later, he starts. Come on in.

he starts his experiments. Oh my Lord, this is straight out.

While reporting this story, we ended up visiting the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine, which is pretty much the coolest room ever. It's all mahogany, and they've got ancient skulls sitting on top of bookshelves, and the books are hundreds and hundreds of years old. In any case, the librarian Arlene Shainer showed us around and then put on some white gloves, disappeared between some stacks, and came out with a little purple book. Beaumont's Observations.

Experiment one is on August 1st, 1825. So at 12 o'clock, I introduced through the perforation into the stomach the following articles of diet. So what he does is he takes different foods. A piece of raw salted fat pork. Some corned beef, you know, like a one-inch square of corned beef. A piece of stale bread. And he attaches them to a silk string and he inserts them. Through the artificial opening into the stomach. Into the stomach. And I help the...

For an hour. And he takes it out and he records, you know. So it was an hour later. How much was digested. Withdrew and examined them. Found the cabbage and bread about half digested. The pieces of meat. This went on for hours. Returned them into the stomach.

At 2 o'clock p.m., withdrew them again. In hours. Returned them into the stomach again. For years. Over the next few years, Beaumont puts anything he can possibly think of into that stomach. Pigs' feet soused take an hour. Animal brains boiled take an hour and 45 minutes. Fresh eggs hard-boiled take three hours and 30 minutes.

Soft-boiled take three hours. Fresh eggs fried take three hours and 30 minutes. Look, it's just the totality of food in America at that point. Whipped eggs take an hour and a half. He's trying everything. Baked custard takes two hours and 45 minutes. Oh my God, that goes on for pages. Goes on and on. Alexis St. Martin is...

becoming increasingly irritable about this whole process. I would imagine. Because a lot of times the things that Beaumont would stick into his stomach would make him sick, give him... So in 1825, three years after this all started, St. Martin finally bolts, goes back to Canada, gets married, even has a few kids. All the while...

Beaumont is writing him letters, trying to lure him back. And he was offering him, OK, I'll pay for your family. OK, I'll give you $50 a year. OK, I'll give you $75. I mean, he kept ending. He's like, I'll throw in the land. Because, you know, he still wanted to know. All right, fine. It takes three hours and 15 minutes to digest a carrot. Oyster soup, three and a half hours. Or soup, whatever. But how does it work? How does the stomach do it?

And eventually, because he needs the money, Alexis St. Martin does come back. Beaumont starts his experiments again. And one night, while Beaumont is peering into the boy's stomach...

He gets his answer. He says he applies a few crumbs of bread to the inner surface of the stomach. Immediately afterwards, small, sharp papillae became visible. He saw little pimples form on the wall of the stomach. And out of the pimples? Exuded a clear, transparent liquor. Outsquirt some juice. Outsquirt some juice. ♪

And that was it. That's the magic juice. Clear, almost transparent. Tasted a little saltish and acid. Ooh. When applied to the tongue. Yeah. Tasting. A lot of tasting went on. And then... He would collect...

the stomach acid and see if you could digest outside the body. There was this theory that the body had this vital force and that that was necessary for the bodily processes including digestion. So if you took the stomach acid out, what would happen? December 14th, 1829, at 1 o'clock p.m., I took one and a half ounces of gastric juice fresh from the stomach

put into it 12 drams recently salted beef boiled. The theory at the time was it wouldn't work. You had to have the magical powers of the human body. But digestion commenced. Beaumont, one of his big discoveries was, no you don't. That actually there are no secret forces of sympathy and excitement driving things. It's a chemical. That's what it's all about.

Now, Beaumont didn't know it, but that juice he was seeing? Which he called gastric juice. Those are enzymes. And what enzymes are are like little chemical scissors. They break down food so that you can take something in from the outside, like this carrot, and absorb it. It becomes literally a part of you. The key to the whole thing, the key to life, are enzymes. In a way, they are the magical force.

Just in chemical form. That's it. That's the truth. He was the first to understand it, the first to see it, the first to figure out the method of how to prove it. And he proved it.

So Beaumont writes a book about this. And this book is published in 1833. And he becomes famous. People were fascinated by Beaumont's experiments. He would kind of go on these tours. He's called over to Yale University. Gets invited to speak in Europe with his, you know, wherever he goes, he brings his gastric juice and he lectures there. From the dude's stomach? Yeah, yeah, he travels around with it. And whenever he could, he would take St. Martin with him. St. Martin was his PowerPoint.

You know, he's like, I need you, man. I need you on the stage so everybody else can come up and stick their tongue in your stomach. For William Beaumont, this works out pretty great. He's thought of as this, you know, tremendous contributor to the understanding of digestion. As for Alexis St. Martin... He was a curiosity. He was a medical curiosity.

Thanks to Arlene Shainer at the New York Academy of Medicine and Fred Kaufman, who wrote a book called A Short History of the American Stomach. And a special thanks to Mary Roach. Her forthcoming book is called Gulp, A Trip Down the Elementary Canal. We'll be back in a moment.

All right, we're back. On with the story.

No, no, I won't do that. While we were making the show, we ended up sending this reporter, Joel Reinberger. So when's the actual feeding going to happen? To Tasmania, of all places. Coming into the room now. To a museum. The Museum of Old and New Art.

It smells like maybe a toilet's backed up. Perhaps a small child has thrown up into a pot plant and nobody's cleaned it up. Because at this museum, they've got a mechanical reproduction of the human gut. Looks like a factory device. It really does. Made by a Belgian guy named Wim de Vole. Hello, Wim. Hello, hello. And the machine... Cloaca new and improved. ...is gigantic. It's 10 feet tall, 40 feet long, but it's essentially...

A series of jars. Six large glass jars. Like 25 gallons each. Pipes coming in and out of them. Surrounded by this tangle of tubes and wires. Motors and regulators. Like a giant chemistry set. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, take us from the start. Tell me about the process that the food goes through. So here's basically how it works.

Climb up these stairs on one end, about nine feet of stairs, until you get to... Sort of a mixing bowl type apparatus. You get to this bowl which has got a hole in it. You can take, say, a sandwich and toss it in. In goes the sandwich, washed down with a little water. The sandwich then gets kind of chopped up by this garbage disposal. Yeah, that's just the churro. Just like with us. It's kind of the mouth of the machine, which takes it in and throws it to the first jar. First one's stomach. Where it meets a bunch of acid and bile. The edge control.

And the sandwich turns to mush. That is orangey or pinkish or yellowy brown color. Next step, the mush gets shuttled into the next set of jars. Next two ones are the intestines. Where it mixes with... A collection of so many different enzymes. That break the sandwich down some more. Next! On to the fourth bottle. What's happening in this one? This is the cola. Mmm.

Okay, if you want to talk about the real mystery of the human gut, it's right here. Not the stomach, it's the colon. Because in the colon you get... Bacteria. And this bacteria do unbelievable things. In any case, just to finish off the tour... Past all the glass jars... The other end of the machine... Is another large piece of apparatus, except this one, on a conveyor belt, rolls out very neatly what looks like to me maybe a St. Bernard-sized turd.

Now some lasagna. Oh, that's easy. Yeah, this one's fine. All right, that'll do it for today. I'm sorry we got a little gross there. I promised coming up next time we are not gross at all. In fact...

Real special, we've got a brand new terrestrials coming up just in advance of the Lunar New Year. We will be diving deep into the history and science of one of the animals associated with the Lunar New Year. So we hope you'll stick around on the feed and check back in two weeks to hear that story. I'm really excited for it.

Thank you, as always, for listening. Next thing you eat, consider the magical journey that that food is on and catch you in a couple spins for this lumpy old planet of ours.

Thanks. Bye.

Start of message. This is John Reiner. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Dylan Keefe, Lynn Levy, and Sean Cole with help from Matt Kielty, Rachel James, Brendan McMullen, and Rafaela Benin.

Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. ♪