Fitch Bits: Weight of the Human Soul
This post was originally shared as a Facebook and Instagram "DID YOU KNOW" post.
I share them and you can get in on the fun by liking my page at Facebook.com/TheNewSlightlyOddFitchburg and following me at Instagram.com/SlightlyOddFitchbur! Now onto the odd story!
DID YOU KNOW the human soul was discovered right in Haverhill, Massachusetts?
Well, as long as you cross your eyes and squint hard enough, anyway. Dr. Duncan MacDougall was his name, and soul searching was his game! He set out to document the weight of the human soul back in 1901, and his results have been a part of the public consciousness ever since.
Duncan’s method was simple. He found six nursing home patients on the verge of death and put them on scales to measure their body weights at the moment of their expiration. His theory was that they would lose weight as their souls left their bodies and his results were, well, mixed.
Four were suffering from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes. He chose them because he wanted patients suffering from exhaustion so they would remain still when the final moment occurred. This, he believed, would allow him to accurately measure their changes in a scientific method that would give him rock solid data to share with the world.
That data, however, didn’t exactly match what he set out to prove. One of the patients lost weight but then put the weight back on, and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death, but a few minutes later lost even more weight. One of the patients lost three-quarters of an ounce, or 21.3 grams in weight, coinciding with the time of death. MacDougall disregarded the results of another patient on the grounds that the scales were "not finely adjusted” and discounted the results of another as the patient died while the equipment was still being calibrated.
With all this in hand, he did what any good researcher would do: he tested dogs instead. Fifteen of them went up on the scale, and fifteen of them showed no changes at all. This led to the only logical conclusion: dogs don’t have souls.
Anyway, he cherry-picked his data and sent it off to the medical community. Luckily, it was pretty heartily panned as pseudoscience with a sample size that was way too small to prove anything.
Things should have ended there, with his soul-searching license revoked, but the story made its way into the public consciousness. In fact, it’s even been talked about in lots of pop culture media, such as the 2003 movie "21 Grams” with the guy who used to be married to Madonna, a 2013 episode of a podcast called "Welcome to Nightvale”, which is good, but not for me, a 2018 song by a feller name o’ “Travis Scott”, and a bunch of others.
Dr. MacDougall was reported as hoping to run further experiments by the New York Times back in 1911, but he never seemed to find the time. He passed away in 1920, and others have tried to carry out their own experiments with varying results.
So, the science was bad, and the results pointed nowhere near what he wanted to prove, but the idea that the soul weighs 21 grams is still a part of the public consciousness. In fact, you probably have it in the back of your mind all the time. Just remember that things everyone just knows usually turn out to be utter nonsense or exaggerations when you scratch the surface just a little bit.
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