Talking about the soul is almost the same thing as talking about death; neither of them has an explanation about what really happens, the only thing that can be said are mere assumptions that help us make sense of life. This fact is not questionable of course, each one faces the existence of different forms and the belief in the soul is one of them, however, trying to quantify it is to speak of big words. Exists a supposedly scientific legend that the soul has a weight of 21 gramswhich has been replicated decade after decade, but what truth is there in this?
Where did the idea of soul weight come from?
The belief in the supposed weight of the soul began more than a century ago in Dorchester, a small town in Boston, United States. The town was the home of Duncan MacDougall, a renowned town doctor. Like the epiphany that came to Newton after watching a big paw fall from a tree, Macdougall experienced something similar when a bee landed on his hat. The action immediately made him question whether humans have souls in the first place and if they occupy a certain space in the mind, then they should register a certain weight.
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The doctor began a series of investigations published in 1907 in the journal American Medicine and the American Society for Psychical Research. There she wrote:
“Since… the substance considered in our hypothesis is organically bound with the body until death occurs, it seems to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitational matter and therefore capable of being detected in the body. moment of death by weighing a human body in the act of death”.
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An unusual experiment
To allay his genuine questioning, MacDougall entered into a partnership with Dorchester’s Consumptives’ Home Hospital, which was a charity dedicated to treating patients with late-stage tuberculosis, a then incurable and deadly disease. The doctor explains in his article why he chose tuberculosis as a relevant disease for his experiments, he said that the patients died in “great exhaustion” and without any movement.
He thought that this would allow him to establish a kind of scale capable of supporting a stretcher and determining the patient’s weight before and after his death. His first case was a man who transcended on April 10, 1901, MacDougall recorded a scale drop of 21.2 grams, data that would go down in history and would be established as the legend of the weight of the soul. However, the data from the second patient did not come close to that of the first, he lost 14 grams before he stopped breathing.
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The more records I got, At least there was a pattern that would give answers to MacDougall. The third patient showed an unexplained loss in two steps, first losing 14 grams and a minute later, an additional 28.3 grams. The following cases cannot even be said to have shown reliable data, since the scale failed.
But MacDougall continued his questioning and repeated the process with 15 dogs, however, did not find weight loss, which indicates in his opinion that they do not have a soul. Although it must also be said that the doctor himself accepted the lack of broader evidence that is required to establish a hypothesis, whether regarding the soul of humans or dogs.
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Today the question about whether the soul has weight is still up in the air, no attempts have been made to replicate this type of experiments with humans due to the ethical implications that it brings with it. Therefore, science cannot answer the question due to the great lack of evidence, perhaps the order of spirituality can only remain qualitative and not quantitative.
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