He weighed human soul
The soul substance gives off a light resembling that of the interstellar ether
Rudolf Wagner’s proposal was greeted with silence. Not a single person present at the Gottingen Congress of Physiologists raised a hand in support of the declaration. When he died in that city a decade later, the search for a “special soul substance” appeared to have died along with him.
It would be another four decades before the notion was again given serious scientific inquiry. Fittingly, Wagner’s name earned a passing mention. Published in 1907, “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance” ended with the simple question:
“Have we found Wagner's soul substance?”
Given the scientific nature of the work, the paper’s author, Duncan MacDougall, wasn’t so much looking for the nature of the soul, but rather something more quantifiable. A month prior to the paper’s April publication, The New York Times had the scoop. Under the headline, “Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks,” the paper noted,
Dr. MacDougall’s object was to learn if the departure of the soul from the body was attended by any manifestation that could be recorded by any physical means. The chief means to which resort was made was the determination of the weight of a body before and after death.
His experiment was conducted in a Boston hospital, by four physicians under his guidance. Subjects were enlisted near death, suffering from a variety of ailments, including tuberculosis and diabetes. Each was specifically chosen in a state of sheer exhaustion, as the experimentation required they stay perfectly still, while their beds were loaded atop an industrial scale and weighed in their entirety. After death, they were weighed again.
Results were mixed. Three of the patients lost weight, while a fourth initially lost some, before gaining it back. A fifth result was discarded, as the patient died at the precise moment the scale was being calibrated. MacDougall noted the varied speed with which the soul escaped the body following the person’s final breath was primarily based on their perceived temperament.
Of the third patient’s death, he explained,
The subject was that of a man with a larger physical build, with a pronounced sluggish temperament. When life ceased, as the body lay in bed upon the scales, for a full minute there appeared to be no change in weight. The physicians waiting in the room looked into each other’s faces silently, shaking their heads to the conviction that our test had failed. ‘Then suddenly the same thing happened that had occurred in the other cases. There was a sudden diminution in weight, which was soon found to be the same as that of the preceding experiments.
Following the experiments, MacDougall settled on a weight on 21 ounces. Though he admitted more work needed to be done to confirm the precise weight of the human soul. In the meantime, he worked to prove his hypothesis that animals do not possess a soul by carrying out a similar set of experiments on five dogs. Unable to round up animals that were moments away from death, it’s believed he took matters into his own hands. After the dogs passed, he found no change in their weight, thereby confirming his secondary hypothesis.
August Clarke soon took MacDougall to task in the pages of American Medicine, beginning a war of worlds between the physicians. The former posited that the loss of weight was the result of sweating – something dogs can’t do. The volleying between the learned men of science continued in the publication’s pages until December.
Like Wagner before him, MacDougall’s work was ultimately greeted with silence by some and derision by his peers. But the physician seemingly never faltered. Four years after his work was revealed to the world, he cast doubt on independent research working to identify an image of the soul with x-ray technology.
Though, he added, it might be possible to photograph the soul nonetheless. “Dr. McDougall is convinced from a dozen experiments with dying people that the soul substance gives off a light resembling that of the interstellar ether,” a contemporary report noted.
MacDougall died in October 1920 at age 54. His life’s work was afforded a paragraph under the headline, “He Weighed Human Soul,” adding in the conclusion, “he was a contributor of poetry to various magazines.”
Sources:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
“As to picturing the soul” https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/07/24/104872238.html?pageNumber=1
“He weighed the human soul” https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1920/10/16/102902870.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0