The history
Two thousand years from a digestive fire and a cooking pot to a hole in a fur trader’s side, a doctor who drank a germ, and the hunger hormone.
For most of history people pictured the stomach as a warm pot that cooks food. In the 1700s experimenters fed birds metal tubes and swallowed bags of food to test whether it grinds or dissolves. A musket accident gave one doctor a window into a living stomach, chemists found its acid and its enzyme, and physiologists found the nerves and hormones that control it. In the 20th century flexible scopes let doctors look inside, pills turned down the acid, and two Australians showed that most ulcers are caused by a germ.
1780
Digestion shown to work in a glass, outside the body
Lazzaro Spallanzani, Italy
1823–1824
Stomach acid identified as hydrochloric acid
William Prout, England
1825–1833
Long study of a living human stomach
William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin, USA
1836
Pepsin named
Theodor Schwann, Germany
1806
Endoscope (a lit tube to look inside the body)
Philipp Bozzini, Germany
1950
Gastrocamera
Tatsuro Uji and Olympus, Japan
1957
Flexible fibreoptic gastroscope
Basil Hirschowitz, USA
1988
Proton pump inhibitor on sale
Omeprazole (Losec), Sweden
1999
Hunger hormone from the stomach
Ghrelin, Kojima and Kangawa, Japan
600 BCE – 1600
Ayurveda’s digestive fire and Galen’s cooking pot: the stomach is pictured as a place of heat.
100 BCE
c. 2nd century BCE to 2nd century CE (dates uncertain)
The Charaka Samhita, a founding text of Ayurveda put together over several centuries, pictures digestion as the work of agni, a fire inside the body. Its main fire, jatharagni, burns in the belly and is said to rule all the others.
Why it mattered. Digestion as heat that transforms food became one of the oldest and longest-lasting ideas about the stomach.
170
2nd century CE
Galen taught that the stomach draws food in, holds it and cooks it with the body’s own heat into a juice, a process called concoction, before pushing it on. The juice was thought to go to the liver to be made into blood. His books were followed for well over a thousand years.
Why it mattered. The idea of the stomach as a warm cooking pot shaped medicine until experiments in the 1700s.
1600 – 1800
Chemists and naturalists test whether the stomach crushes food or dissolves it, with birds, tubes and their own stomachs.
1648
1648 (published after his death)
The Flemish chemist van Helmont argued that food is not simply cooked. He proposed that an acid “ferment” in the stomach turns it into something new. His writings were published by his son four years after he died.
Why it mattered. It moved the question from heat to chemistry.
1752
Réaumur fed a tame bird of prey (usually described as a kite or buzzard) small metal tubes with holes, filled with meat. The tubes protected the meat from being crushed, yet when the bird coughed them up the meat had partly dissolved. He also had it swallow sponges on threads to collect its stomach juice.
Why it mattered. It showed that digestion is more than grinding: a juice dissolves food.
1780
The Italian priest and scientist Spallanzani swallowed small linen bags and pierced wooden tubes holding food, and got them back to see what had happened. He collected gastric juice and showed it could digest meat in a glass outside the body, published in 1780.
Why it mattered. Digestion in a glass proved it is a chemical process, not life-force or cooking.
1800 – 1890
A wounded fur trader, the discovery of hydrochloric acid and pepsin, and the first looks inside.
1806
Bozzini built the Lichtleiter, a “light conductor”: a candle, a mirror and a set of tubes for looking into body openings. The medical faculty in Vienna dismissed it as a curiosity.
Why it mattered. It was the first attempt at an endoscope, the tool doctors now use to look inside the stomach.
1822
6 June 1822
A musket went off by accident at close range and wounded Alexis St. Martin, a young French-Canadian fur trader. The army surgeon William Beaumont saved his life, but the wound healed with a permanent opening, a fistula, from his stomach to the skin.
Why it mattered. For the first time, a living human stomach could be watched at work.
1824
Read 11 December 1823, published 1824
The English doctor and chemist Prout analysed stomach contents from animals and showed that the acid is hydrochloric acid, the same acid chemists made from sea salt. He presented the paper to the Royal Society in December 1823.
Why it mattered. It named the stomach’s strongest weapon.
1833
1825–1833
Over eight years Beaumont dangled pieces of food on silk threads into St. Martin’s stomach, pulled them out to see how far they had digested, and drew off gastric juice to digest food in jars. In 1833 he published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice.
Why it mattered. It proved gastric juice digests food chemically and that the stomach churns, and it became a classic of physiology.
1836
Schwann found a substance in gastric juice, different from the acid, that breaks down egg white and meat. He named it pepsin, from the Greek word for digestion. It was one of the first enzymes ever described.
Why it mattered. It showed that the acid has a partner that does much of the protein cutting.
1868
Kussmaul pushed a straight, rigid metal tube, lit from outside by a lamp, down the throat of a professional sword swallower and looked into his stomach. It worked, but the light was poor and the tube dangerous for ordinary patients.
Why it mattered. It was the first look inside a living human stomach through the mouth.
1877
Kühne coined the word “enzyme”, from Greek for “in yeast”, for substances like pepsin that speed up chemical changes without being alive themselves.
Why it mattered. Pepsin, amylase and lipase got a family name.
1890 – 1970
X-rays show the stomach churning, Pavlov shows nerves switch it on, and gastrin shows it sends itself chemical messages.
1898
1896–1898 (first paper January 1898)
Soon after X-rays were discovered, the medical student Walter Cannon fed animals food mixed with bismuth salts, which show up on X-ray, and watched waves of squeezing sweep across their stomachs. His first paper appeared in the first issue of the American Journal of Physiology.
Why it mattered. It revealed peristalsis and the stomach’s mixing, and led to the barium meal X-ray.
1904
Pavlov studied dogs with small surgical pouches of stomach and showed that the sight, smell and taste of food start gastric juice flowing, through nerves including the vagus nerve. He won the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion”, years before his famous work on conditioned reflexes.
Why it mattered. It showed that the brain and nerves switch digestion on.
1905
Edkins found that extracts of the lower stomach lining make the stomach produce acid, and suggested a hormone, which he called gastrin.
Why it mattered. It showed the stomach sends itself chemical messages as well as nerve signals.
1964
Sixty years after Edkins guessed it existed, Hilda Tracy and Roderic Gregory purified gastrin from pig stomachs and worked out what it is made of.
Why it mattered. It proved the stomach’s acid hormone was real.
1930 – 1995
Bendable scopes, cameras and glass fibres let doctors see inside, including in India, and new medicines reduce acid.
1932
The doctor Rudolf Schindler and the instrument maker Georg Wolf built a semi-flexible gastroscope, with many small lenses in a tube that could bend a little. It made looking into the stomach much safer.
Why it mattered. It turned gastroscopy into an everyday test for the first time.
1950
At a time when stomach cancer was the leading cause of death in Japan, the surgeon Tatsuro Uji asked Olympus for a camera that could photograph the stomach from inside. With the engineer Mutsuo Sugiura they built the gastrocamera, a tiny camera and flash bulb on the tip of a flexible tube.
Why it mattered. Photographs of the stomach lining helped doctors spot cancers early.
1957
February 1957
Working with the physicist Wilbur Peters and the student Larry Curtiss, the South African-born doctor Hirschowitz made a flexible scope from a bundle of thin glass fibres that carry light around bends. He first passed it down his own throat, then a patient’s a few days later. Production models followed in 1960.
Why it mattered. The flexible fibreoptic endoscope changed gastroenterology for good.
1975
Early and mid-1970s
Diagnostic endoscopy was started in the early and mid-1970s at central institutes, the Postgraduate Institute in Chandigarh and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, with B. N. Tandon at AIIMS among the pioneers. Specialist gastroenterology departments grew in Mumbai, Kolkata and elsewhere.
Why it mattered. It brought the new flexible scopes to one of the world’s largest populations.
1976
Cimetidine (Tagamet) blocks the histamine signal that tells parietal cells to make acid. Launched in the UK in 1976, it let many ulcers heal without surgery. James Black shared the 1988 Nobel Prize.
Why it mattered. It began the era of acid-reducing medicines.
1988
Omeprazole, sold as Losec, went on sale in Sweden in 1988. It blocks the H⁺/K⁺-ATPase, the proton pump that parietal cells use to make acid. It became one of the best-selling medicines ever.
Why it mattered. Doctors gained a powerful way to reduce acid for reflux and ulcers.
1979 – today
H. pylori overturns what doctors believed about ulcers, and the stomach turns out to help control appetite.
1979
The pathologist Robin Warren kept seeing small curved bacteria on stomach biopsies, always with inflammation. Textbooks said nothing could live in stomach acid.
Why it mattered. One careful observer refused to ignore what he saw.
1982
The young doctor Barry Marshall joined Warren and tried to grow the bacteria. The cultures only succeeded when some plates were left over the long Easter weekend: the germ grows slowly. It was later named Helicobacter pylori.
Why it mattered. It gave the germ a name and let others test the claim.
1984
Few believed that a germ causes stomach disease, and there was no animal model, so Marshall drank a culture of H. pylori himself. Within days he fell ill with a badly inflamed stomach, and a biopsy showed the bacteria had moved in.
Why it mattered. His daring experiment helped convince the world that ulcers can be caused by an infection.
1994
A US National Institutes of Health panel recommended that ulcer patients infected with H. pylori be treated with antibiotics. The same year the WHO’s cancer agency classified the germ as a cause of stomach cancer.
Why it mattered. Ulcers went from a lifelong illness to one that antibiotics can usually cure.
1999
December 1999
Kojima and his team discovered ghrelin, a hormone made mainly in the stomach. Later studies showed its level rises before meals and falls after eating, so it became known as the hunger hormone.
Why it mattered. It showed the stomach helps tell the brain when to eat.
2005
Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”.
Why it mattered. It honoured an idea that most experts had laughed at twenty years earlier.
2024
A review of 1,748 studies from 111 countries found that the share of people with H. pylori fell from about 58% in 1980–1990 to about 43% in 2011–2022, though it is still common, especially in children in many countries.
Why it mattered. Stomach ulcers and stomach cancer are becoming rarer in many places as the germ declines.
By the numbers
A 2024 review of 1,748 studies from 111 countries: H. pylori infection fell from about 58% of people in 1980–1990 to about 43% in 2011–2022.
Did you know?
Alexis St. Martin, the man with a hole in his stomach, lived to 78 and outlived his doctor William Beaumont by 27 years.
Kussmaul’s first look into a living stomach, in 1868, needed a professional sword swallower, who could take a straight metal tube.
Pepsin takes its name from the Greek word for digestion, and was one of the first enzymes ever described.
Barry Marshall drank a culture of H. pylori in 1984 and fell ill within days, which helped win him a Nobel Prize in 2005.
The cells on the surface of the stomach lining are replaced every few days, one reason the stomach doesn’t digest itself.
The people
129 – c. 216 · Physician · Pergamon, worked in Rome
Taught that the stomach cooks food, an idea trusted for 1,400 years.
1683 – 1757 · Naturalist · France
Showed with a bird of prey and metal tubes that gastric juice dissolves food.
1729 – 1799 · Priest and biologist · Italy
Swallowed bags of food and digested meat in a glass.
1785 – 1853 · Army surgeon · USA
Studied digestion through the hole in Alexis St. Martin’s stomach.
1802 – 1880 · Fur trader · Canada
The man with a window in his stomach, who outlived his doctor by 27 years.
1785 – 1850 · Doctor and chemist · England
Identified hydrochloric acid in the stomach.
1849 – 1936 · Physiologist · Russia
Won the 1904 Nobel Prize for showing how nerves control digestion.
20th century · Physiologist · England
With Roderic Gregory, isolated the hormone gastrin in 1964.
1925 – 2013 · Gastroenterologist · South Africa, worked in the USA
Made the first flexible fibreoptic gastroscope.
1937 – 2024 · Pathologist · Australia
Spotted the curved bacteria in stomach biopsies.
born 1951 · Physician · Australia
Grew H. pylori and drank it to prove it makes the stomach ill.
20th–21st century · Biochemist · Japan
Led the team that discovered ghrelin, the hunger hormone.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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