As further evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation, Gall cites a young widow who admitted that since childhood she had felt “strong desires that were impossible to resist” and during these moments the nape of her neck burned. Gall describes placing his hand on her young widowly nape during one of these burning-desire episodes and discovering “a very considerable rounded prominence,” possibly one of several going on in the room.
Item #19.216 of the Gall collection is the skull of Franz Joseph Gall. Gall disciple N. J. Ottin notes that “on the occiput, the tendency toward sex was very marked.”
From Gall’s day onward, the soul began to drift away from the provinces of anatomy and neurology and off into airier domains: religion, philosophy, parapsychology. The men of medicine were through with the soul—with one terrifically odd exception.
3. HOW TO WEIGH A SOUL
What Happens When a Man (or a Mouse, or a Leech) Dies on a Scale
IT WAS A pretty place to die. The mansion on Blue Hill Avenue was the showpiece of the Dorchester, Massachusetts, estate known as Grove Hall. Four stories tall, with a porticoed porch and cliques of indolent shade trees, the mansion had been home to T. K. Jones, a wealthy merchant in the China trade. In 1864, it was bought by a physician-cum-faith-healer named Charles Cullis, who turned it into the Consumptives’ Home—a charitable operation for late-stage tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) patients. With the discovery of antibiotics sixty years off, prayer was as useful a treatment as any then on offer. TB patients were routinely packed off to sanitariums, ostensibly to partake of rest “cures,” but mainly to keep them from spreading the disease.
Had you been visiting the Consumptives’ Home in April 1901, you might have been witness to a curious undertaking. A plump, meek-looking man of thirty-four, wearing wire-frame glasses and not as much hair as he once did, was stooped over the platform of an ornate Fairbanks scale, customizing the device with wooden supports and what appeared to be an army-style cot. The scale was an oversized commercial model, for weighing silk—no doubt a holdover from Jones’s mercantile days.
Clearly something unorthodox was afoot. Though weight loss was a universal undertaking at the Consumptives’ Home, no one needed a commercial scale to track it.
The man with the hammer was Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon and physician who lived in a mansion of his own, in nearby Haverhill. Macdougall was acquainted with the Consumptives’ Home attending physician, but he himself was not on staff. Nor was he treating any of the patients, or even praying for them. Quite the opposite; Macdougall was literally—perhaps even a little eagerly—waiting for them to die.
For the preceding four years of his life, Duncan Macdougall had been hatching a plan to prove the existence of the human soul. If, as most religions held, people leave their bodies behind at death and persist in the form of a soul, then mustn’t this soul occupy space? “It is unthinkable,” wrote Macdougall, “that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that which does not occupy space.” And if they occupy space, he reasoned, they must have weight. “The question arose in my mind: Why not weigh a man at the very moment of death?” If the beam moved, and the body lost even a fraction of an ounce, he theorized, that loss might represent the soul’s departure.
Macdougall enlisted the help of two fellow physicians, Drs. Sproull and Grant, who chose not—or possibly weren’t invited—to put their names on the research paper. The plan was to install a cot on the scale platform and then install a dying consumptive on the cot. Death from consumption is a still, quiet affair, and so it fit Macdougall’s conditions “to a nicety,” as he put it. “A consumptive dying after a long illness wasting his energies, dies with scarcely a movement to disturb the beam, their bodies are also very light, and we can be forewarned for hours that a consumptive is dying.” I found his enthusiasm at once endearing and a little troubling. I imagined him addressing the ward as he canvassed for volunteers. (Macdougall wrote in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research that he secured his subjects’ consent some weeks before their deaths.) You people are just perfect for this project. A, You’re easy to lift, B, you’re practically comatose when you go…. Who knows what the consumptives made of it, or whether they were too out of it to know what he was asking.
At 5:30 p.m. on April 10, 1901, Patient 1’s death—“my opportunity,” Macdougall called it—was declared imminent. A male of ordinary build and “standard American temperament,” he was wheeled from the ward and lifted onto the scale like a depleted bolt of silk. Macdougall summoned his partners. For three hours and forty minutes, the physicians watched the man fade. In place of the more usual bedside attitudes of grief and pity, the men assumed an air of breathless, intent expectancy. I imagine you see this on the faces of NASA engineers during countdown and, possibly, vultures.
One doctor watched the man’s chest; another, the movements of his face. Macdougall himself kept his eyes on the scale’s indicator. “Suddenly, coincident with death,” wrote Macdougall, “the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.” Which is, yes, twenty-one grams. Hollywood metricized its reference to the event for the simple reason that 21 Grams sounds better. Who’s going to go see a movie called Point Seven Five Ounces?
Over the years, Macdougall repeated the experiment on five more patients. A paper summarizing his findings ran in the journal American Medicine in 1907. In the months that followed, dubious M.D s launched their criticisms in lengthy letters to the editor. Macdougall countered them all. One correspondent pointed out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the loss was perhaps urine and/or feces. Macdougall patiently replied that if this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon the scale. Someone else suggested that the dying patients’ final exhalation might have contributed to the drop in weight. To prove that it hadn’t, Macdougall gamely climbed onto the cot and exhaled “as forcibly as possible,” while Sproull watched the scale. No change was observed.
The most likely culprit was something called “insensible loss”: body weight that is continually being lost through evaporating perspiration and water vapor in one’s breath. Macdougall claimed to have accounted for this. His first patient, he wrote, lost water weight at the rate of an ounce per hour, far too slowly for insensible loss to explain the sudden three-quarter-ounce drop at death.
THE HISTORICAL AUTHORITY on insensible weight loss is a Paduan physiologist named Sanctorius. Known humdrumly as the “founding father of metabolic balance studies,” Sanctorius coined the term “insensible perspiration” in 1690, in a diverting volume entitled Medicina statica.[13] To aid him in his research, Sanctorius devised an experimental scale of his own. He suspended a platform on a massive steelyard scale. The platform held a bench with a hole cut out of the center of it and a bucket underneath it, and in front of the platform stood a supper table: Out box and In box. Sanctorius sat himself down on the platform, enjoyed a meal, and then sat around on the scale for eight hours, availing himself of the bucket when needed. He then weighed, to use his exuberantly capitalized phrasings, “the Excrements of the Guts”—observing on an unrelated tangent that “the thick ones are lighter and swim.” Sanctorius found that a small portion of the food weight remained unaccounted for, i.e., wasn’t down there in the bucket. This he ascribed to evaporated sweat and breath vapor, which he collectively dubbed insensible perspiration.
13
Medical treatises were eminently more readable in Sanctorius’s day.