Duncan MacDougall

New York Times article, March 11, 1907, on MacDougall's investigation

Duncan MacDougall ( 1866 - October 15, 1920 ) was an American doctor from Haverhill , Massachusetts who tried in the early 20th century to determine the "weight of the soul " by weighing dying patients.

Experiments on the weight of the soul

In 1902 MacDougall weighed six dying patients in an attempt at psychostasia . He wanted to prove that the soul was material and measurable - the weight difference between living and dead patients averaged 21 grams (between 8 and 35 g) according to his statements. In March 1907, a report of this investigation appeared in the New York Times, and two reports in the same year in the medical journal American Medicine .

MacDougall continued to poison fifteen dogs and see no weight loss while they were dying, from which he concluded that dogs have no souls. Later he tried to recognize the human soul as a “shadow image ” on X-rays .

In the 1930s, teacher and science enthusiast H. LaVerne Twining repeated McDougall's experiments in Los Angeles with mice. First he succeeded in measuring a weight loss at the moment of death in a mouse that had died of cyanide . In another experiment, however, he locked the dying animal in a hermetically sealed glass container. The weight stayed the same. Twining concluded that the mouse's body suffered severe fluid loss at the moment of death, which would explain the weight loss. Since the liquid could not escape from the closed container, the total weight also remained the same. People of different weights with different fluid levels would have lost different amounts of fluid. McDougall's experiments are now considered unscientific, but his 21-gram hypothesis still plays a role in popular culture.

In 2003, the film 21 grams was named after MacDougall's approach and his results . The core weight determined by MacDougall and the subject of measurement accuracy also play an important role in the framework of the film drama 1001 grams from 2014.

Publications

• Duncan MacDougall: Hypothesis concerning soul substance together with experimental evidence of the existence of such substance. In: American Medicine, April 1907, Vol. II, 240-243.
• Duncan MacDougall: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance. In: American Medicine, July 1907, Vol. II, 395-397, OCLC 503784799 .

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• Len Fisher: Weighing the Soul: Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre. Arcade Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1559707321 (page 14/15 on LaVerne Twining).

Web links

• Summary of MacDougall's work on Snopes.com
• Soul has weight, physician thinks (PDF file, 100 kB). Article from: Special to The New York Times (March 11, 1907), p. 5.