Is It Possible To Weigh A Person’s Soul?

This was the question posed by physician Dr Duncan MacDougall in the early 1900s, and this is the story of how he tried to prove it.

Duncan MacDougall was born in Glasgow in Scotland in 1866. He moved to the USA and got a medical degree from Boston School of Medicine. He started a medical practice in Haverhill, Massachusetts, got married and settled down to start a family.

It was while he was there working at a Hospice that he had a theory that the human soul was a separate entity to the body, and weighing a person at the exact time of death would prove it.

And that’s what he tried to do.

There are different facts floating around about how he came about weighing souls. Some say he built his own weighing scale to accommodate a hospital bed or stretcher with a person on it. Others say that he was at a place that already had an old scale available for this use. This could have been true, with him working in a hospice during his medical down time. In his 1907 paper explaining the experiment, he describes the weighing scales as ‘a light frame work built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales’.

According to other records, MacDougall experimented on about fifteen dogs before he tried the process with humans, but I don’t want to go into that in great detail because I’m betting the dogs didn’t give him permission to pop them off for his research.

The Soul Weighs 21 Grams

The people who consented to be weighed upon their death were all dying of issues that made them quite sedentary, because any movement made during death would possibly ruin the experiment.

They consisted of six patients who took between 5 minutes and 4 hours and fifteen minutes to pass away. MacDougall noted during the wait that the body ‘lost weight slowly per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat’, so weight was already inconsistent in the run up to death.

Out of his six patients there were only four that he could rely on for data. Out of the other two one had too much interference from outside forces who didn’t want MacDougall performing the experiment – think Greenpeace stopping the whaling boats – and the other had died too quickly on the scale before they were balanced.

Many comments were made about the expulsion of bodily fluids at the time of death, seeing that the body is seen to expel anything in the bowels, bladder and stomach shortly before the time of passing. But MacDougall accounts for this in his paper. He explains that the bowels didn’t move in any patients and any urine expelled stayed on the bed, so would not alter the weight at all. Which makes sense if you think about it. If someone poops on the bed on the scale, it’s still on the scale, just not in the body.

The experiment did bring forth some results for the Doctor though. He managed to distinguish a weight loss of on average 21 grams from the time of death, and attributed this to the soul leaving the body.

Dr MacDougall hypothesised that the soul was made up of substance, such as all space occupying material ‘is divisible into that which is gravitative – solids, liquids, gases, all having weight – and the ether, which is non-gravitative.’

The Problem With The Research

Before MacDougall could publish his results, an article appeared in the New York Times, alleging to have the scoop on the research.

The article said ‘That the human soul has a definite weight, which can be determined when it passes from the body, is the belief of Dr Duncan MacDougall, a reputable physician of Haverhill. He is at the head of a Research Society which for six years has been experimenting in this field. With him, he says, have been associated four other physicians’.

This article went out on 11th March 1907, a month before MacDougall published his findings.

The trouble is, the scientific community heavily criticised the experiment stating that it was flawed in many aspects.

I’ll give you a quick rundown of research projects in the scientific community, to give you an idea of how they work. (I only know this from a miserable Masters in Psychology that I crawled through many moons ago, so I can put it into simple terms.)

For the purpose of research, the bigger the sample – or the people/subjects that are participating in the research – the better the results. For instance, I sampled 142 relationships to see if you could quantify how long a relationship will last. (You can.) So the scientific community obviously thought that 6 people – and only 4 that mattered – could not give any kind of a result. And they’re right, if you think about it. There’s also the matter of not being able to accurately assess the time of death except for watching the person die. If the experiment was done in modern times, they would be hooked up to heart monitors and all sorts to show the exact time of death. As it stands, in 1906, the only way of knowing the heart had stopped was to listen to it through one of the first stethoscopes which were a bit like a trumpet, or to place the ear to the chest, which would have affected the weight on the scale. And to see a person stop breathing would involve just watching the chest stop rising and falling. Even then, the heart keeps beating for some time after the patient stops breathing.

Scientists also said that the cooling of the body after death would add weight to the body, because the body would no longer expel sweat or moisture. There is further data in MacDougall’s paper that states some of the people he sampled put on weight again shortly after death, even the ones who lost grams when they expired.

Photographing Souls

MacDougall gained some fame in the scientific community with his soul weighing experiment, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. And he allegedly intended to follow this with an experiment to photograph the human soul leaving the body at the time of death. It doesn’t seem that he followed through on this experiment though, and he passed away in 1920 having never recovered from the great soul weighing experiment.

Still Not Proven

The soul weighing experiment hasn’t been repeated on humans ever since and, as far as I am aware, there is still no proof that the human soul exists as a separate entity to the body.

If we look at it in a philosophical way, the soul is who we are, not what we are, so why would we try and measure it anyway? Do we really need to know if a soul has weight? And if we do, would there be people who have absolutely hugely heavy souls and those who have none? If we believe in good and evil wouldn’t there be people who would die without a soul leaving?

There have been similar experiments in recent years, taking some direction from MacDougall. In 2001 a physicist tried a similar experiment on sheep, lambs and goats, finding that the animals gained weight at the time of death, but slowly returned to their initial weight over the hours afterwards.

And in 2005 a Dr Gerard Nahum proposed an experiment using electromagnetic detectors to pick up escaping energy from the body at the time of death and tried to get universities and the church to fund his research. But he was rejected.

It seems that we will probably never get to know if the soul has any weight, because the scientific community will never agree to do the research – it’s just not serious science.

So for now, we can pretend it’s 21 grams. If anyone asks.

You can read the journal paper from Dr Duncan MacDougall here:

https://diogenesii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/duncan_macdougall_1907_-_21pp.pdf