............................................................................................................................................
The Real Story Behind "21
Grams"
loss in weight at the
moment of death
Joe Schwarcz PhD
The April 1907 issue
of American Medicine featured a paper by Dr. Duncan Macdougall describing his
experiment whereby the beds of dying patients were placed on a sensitive
balance.
Believe it or not, he
was trying to weigh the human soul!
The paper was titled
“Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of
The Existence of Such Substance.”
Macdougall of
Haverhill, Massachusetts placed six dying patients on the specially
constructed balance and concluded that at the
moment of death there was a loss in weight of about three quarters of
an ounce, or 21 grams.
He had previously
determined the weight loss attributed to evaporation of moisture from the skin,
and by comparison this was sudden and much larger.
He even controlled
for weight loss due to urine and fecal eliminations and concluded that these
could not account for the change in weight.
Air loss from the
lungs was not the answer either, as he determined by lying on the scale himself
and noting that breathing had no effect on weight.
After weighing his
six patients, Macdougall went to work on dogs.
How he got his hands
on 15 dying dogs is not clear, but he found no weight loss at the moment they
expired.
He wasn’t surprised
of course because he didn’t think dogs had souls.
No one since has
confirmed Macdougall’s findings but the movie “21 Grams” was based on this
idea.
Joe
Schwarcz is Director of the McGill
Office for Science and Society. He is well known for his informative and
entertaining public lectures on topics ranging from the chemistry of love to
the science of aging. Dr. Joe has received numerous awards for teaching
chemistry and for interpreting science for the public and is the only
non-American ever to win the American Chemical Society’s prestigious
Grady-Stack Award for demystifying chemistry. He hosts "The Dr. Joe
Show" on Montreal's CJAD and has appeared hundreds of times on The
Discovery Channel, CTV, CBC, TV Ontario and Global Television. He is also
an amateur conjurer and often spices up his presentations with a little
magic. Dr. Joe also writes a newspaper column entitled “The Right
Chemistry” and has authored a number of books including
best-sellers, Radar, Hula Hoops and Playful Pigs, The Genie in the
Bottle, The Right Chemistry, An Apple a Day, Is That a
Fact?, and Monkeys, Myths, and Molecules. Dr. Joe was awarded the
2010 Montreal Medal, the Canadian Chemical Institute’s premier prize
recognizing lifetime contributions to chemistry in Canada. In 2015 he was named
winner of the Balles Prize for critical thinking by the US based Committee
for Skeptical Inquiry in recognition of his 2014 book, Is That A Fact?
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