In 1901 a doctor named Duncan MacDougall tried to prove the existence of the human soul. To do so he measured the weight of a person at the moment of death. He had 6 patients all of which experienced weight loss with the average loss of weight being 21 grams. In 1901, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. It was relatively easy to determine when death was only a few hours away, and at this point the entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was apparently sensitive to the gram. He took his results (a varying amount of perceived mass loss in most of the six cases) to support his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass. The determination of the soul weighing 21 grams was based on the average loss of mass in the six patients within moments after death. Experiments on mice and other animals took place. Most notably the weighing upon death of sheep seemed to create mass for a few minutes which later disappeared. The hypothesis was made that a soul portal formed upon death which then whisked the soul away. MacDougall also measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as uniformly negative, with no perceived change in mass. He took these results as confirmation that the soul had weight, and that dogs did not have souls. MacDougalls complaints about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural causes that would have been ideal led one author to conjecture that he was in fact poisoning dogs to conduct these experiments. In March 1907, accounts of MacDougalls experiments were published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and the medical journal American Medicine, while the news was spread to the general public by New York Times. His results have never been attempted to be reproduced, and are generally regarded either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any scientific merit. Nonetheless, MacDougalls finding that presumably the human soul weighed 21 grams has become a meme in the public consciousness, mostly due to its claiming the titular thesis in the 2003 film 21 Grams. MacDougall’s experiments were published in the New York Times and some medical journals. Interesting Fact: MacDougall’s complaints in his journal about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural causes led to the suspicion that he was poisoning dogs to conduct his experiments. Also: These experiments inspired a film called “21 Grams” starring Sean Penn
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:28:03 +0000