In 1913,Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed six patients while they were
in the process of dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. It
was relatively easy to determine when death was only a few hours
away, and at this point the entire bed was placed on an industrial
sized scale which was apparently sensitive to the gram. He took his
results (a varying amount of perceived mass loss in most of the six
cases) to support his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when
the soul departed the body, so did this mass. The determination of
the soul weighing 21 grams was based on the average loss of mass in
the six patients within minutes or hours after death. Experiments
on mice and other animals took place. Most notably the weighing
upon death of sheep seemed to create mass for a few minutes which
later disappeared. The hypothesis was made that a soul portal
formed upon death which then whisked the soul away.
MacDougall also measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances
and reported the results as "uniformly negative," with no perceived
change in mass. He took these results as confirmation that the soul
had weight, and that dogs did not have souls. MacDougall's
complaints about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural
causes that would have been ideal have led at least one author to
conjecture that he was in fact poisoning dogs to conduct these
experiments.[1] In March 1907, accounts of MacDougall's experiments
were published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical
Research and the medical journal American Medicine, while the news
was spread to the general public by New York Times.
His results have never been reproduced, and are generally regarded
either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any
scientific merit.[1][2] Nonetheless, MacDougall's finding that the
human soul weighed 21 grams has become a meme in the public
consciousness, mostly due to its claiming the titular thesis in the
2003 film 21 Grams.
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