The Weight of the Soul
I'm pretty sure I stumbled over this story before, but this is a longer article about the scientist that tried to weight the human soul:
That the human body should be home to a physical soul which survived death was at one time rarely questioned. Then came the advent of scientific disciplines such as anatomy, chemistry and physics, whose probing and measuring raised awkward questions about where in the body a soul could live and what physical form it could take. With no medical proof being forthcoming, in 1854 the German anatomist Rudolph Wagner suggested that there must be a “special soul substance” in the body, evidence of which should be sought out by experimentation. Wagner was much ridiculed for his beliefs, and some years later his rival Ernst Haeckel mocked that at the moment of death it might be possible to liquefy the soul by freezing it and then “exhibit it in a bottle as immortal fluid”.
The nature of a human soul was a much-discussed topic within Victorian psychical research communities, many of whose members were also eminent scientists. Different philosophical conclusions were reached, but none was based on empirical evidence, it being deemed too difficult to measure any of the soul’s presumed physical properties. However, not everyone was prepared to accept this, and in the winter of 1896 Dr Duncan MacDougall, a Massachusetts-based surgeon, came up with a novel idea. “Why not,” he asked, “weigh on accurate scales a man at the very moment of death?”
MacDougall was a member of the American Society of Psychical Research and had a fascination with the idea that the human personality could survive death. Like others in his profession, he knew of no physical location within the body where the soul could be found but believed that it was “unthinkable that personality and continual personal identity should exist… and not occupy space”. He termed the hypothetical space occupied by the human personality the “soul substance” and argued that, because it did not leave the body until the moment of physical death, it must be held in place by an organic link. This, suggested MacDougall, meant that the soul substance probably had some form of mass and was “therefore cap able of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death”.
Which is exactly what he did: he put people on the brink of death on a scale and recorded the change. Or ... at least he tried: while the first test was successful, later ones mostly failed due to different reasons. Even a test with "healthy dogs" being put down proved no weight loss – but then again, dogs do not have a soul.
MacDougall’s correspondence reveals a man with an unswerving belief in the existence of a human soul. At every turn he sought to justify his results in these terms, dismissing or ignoring any evidence to the contrary. It is, for example, possible that he ignored the results of the sixth patient because, in his own words, “there was no loss of weight” measured at the time of death. MacDougall explained in a letter that the negative result was probably due to the patient having been on the scales for only a few minutes, which caused him to doubt “whether I had the beam accurately balanced before death”. This seems like an afterthought used to explain an inconvenient result and one wonders what his reaction would have been should the result have been favourable.
The idea that there is a soul and that it should have a weight is something that fascinates people to this day – or there would not be any poems or films about this topic.
[via boingboing]
