When in 1907 a doctor tried to demonstrate the existence of the soul using a scale

When We are going to bedthe brain Beast begins to work. It is when we review the day, We can think of great ideas that we do not point and ask ourselves questions of all kinds that We do not usually remember the next morning. Duncan Macdougall did remember what may be asked just before sleeping: How much does the human soul weigh?

The concept of soul It is complicated, since there are those who see it as an intrinsic element to the body, but also something that fades “when we die. Macdougall, a doctor from Haverhill, Massachusetts, had to say “science is not done alone” and got to work to test a hypothesis. What hypothesis? That, if the soul exists and is inside the body, it must have a weight.

His theory was that, if at the time of death the soul escapes our body, it could measure its weight. And he got to the work of the most handmade work possible. Also of the least scientific.

Science is not done alone, you have to do it

He is romantic, almost tender, now think about his reasoning. But he had all the logic of the world to respond to something so complex: at the time of death, there should be a detectable loss of weight because the soul abandons the body. As if the soul were the “pilot” who jumps from the plane before crashing.

To test his theory, Macdougall built a fairly special scale: a bed mounted on a weight capable of detecting differences of up to five grams. His plan was not very ethical, but all for the sake of science and to try something so important: place dying patients on top of the scale and monitor weight changes just before and after death.

It took his thing. Between 1901 and 1907, Macdougall conducted this experiment with six terminal patients. Four of them had tuberculous, one was diabetic and the other had no specified causes. They were chosen conscientiously and should be people who had conditions that depleted them mentally. They had to move as little as possible when they died so that the measurement was more precise.

Macdougall was pending at all times of those final moments of the patients and, when he detected that one was about to die, he placed the bed on the scale and made the measurements. And the results soon arrived. According to the doctor, the first patient lost, exactly, 21,26 grams just after exhalation. It is the most famous case and the one that gave name to the experiment.

The second patient also lost weight, but the amount was not recorded correctly. And with the other four … Things were even more complicated: the technical problems when registering the weight appeared for two other records, another showed a gradual loss (he died with his mouth open and Macdougall said it could be air) and another showed no changes.

For any scientific eye, the success of the experiment would have been very questionable, but the doctor clung to those 21 grams of the first death to affirm that this was what weighed the soul.

In fact, he did not stay at Anecdote: he published a study in the magazine American Medicine with the title “Hypothesis Concering Soul Substance Together With Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance”, although before it had already appeared in the New York Times.

With animals, MacDougall went from thread

Although MacDougall ‘chained’ that data, in his internal jurisdiction he should know that he needed another control group. If it had taken six years to weigh six dying, I could not “waste” more time, so he tried to try his theory with animals. There was some red flag in all this.

To begin with, Macdougall was convinced that humans had a soul, something that animals lacked. He had already observed “problems” when measuring the weight of the human soul, so everything that was a scale without measurement changes in the case of animals, he would take it as confirmation that, indeed, animals had no soul.

The experiment was already conditioned and Macdougall ended up measuring the weight of a fortnight of dogs. The researcher wanted to use sick or dying dogs to prove his thesis, but did not find enough and There are those who point that, directly, poisoned healthy dogs.

Scientific community with the lifted eyebrow

The doctor’s results were not long in causing a stir and there was another doctor who considered the experiment a hoax. Augustus P. Clarke argument That everything was easily refatible from the medical point of view: when we are in that situation, the lungs stop cooling the blood, the body temperature increases and the skin sweats.

And in the case of animals, as they do not have sweat glands, because they do not lose weight after death. Macdougall did not convince and starred in a ‘Beef’ in medical magazines for a few months.

Over time, other scientists joined the MacDougall Experiment Discrediting process, being a clear case of rejection by the scientific community both for the methods and for the “fraud” when obtaining the results. Apart from randomness, One of the criticism is that six cases do not represent a reliable sample. In fact, in A subsequent investigation With sheep, lambs and rams, it was observed that, indeed, the weight varied after death, but they did not lose it: they won it.

Specifically, from 18 to 780 grams that they won at the time of death, but that over time lost to recover the initial weight.

However, it is undeniable that Duncan went down in history. Not for what I would have liked, be that person who showed that the human soul had a weightbut as an example of Selective informationhow to use a vague fact to affirm a preconceived idea.

Also by that scientific spirit that, although poorly applied, tried to use evidence to measure something as complex spiritual as the human soul. Although, to be fair with Duncan, although he clung to those 21 grams, himself accurate that a more exhaustive investigation was needed than the one he had done.

And, curiously, those 21 grams that weighs the soul permeated popular culture. The movie title ‘21 grams’ Alejandro González Iñárritu is inspired by the Macdougall experiment, but has also been used in other films, series and even in songs.

Images | Thomas,