A doctor named Duncan MacDougall conducted an extraordinary series of experiments in 1907. He claimed that dead people lost 21 grams, which is the weight of the soul.
MacDougall, who thought that the soul must have mass, therefore a weighable weight of the soul He believed he could. To prove this, he measured how much weight the patients lost by weighing dying patients on a precision scale before, at the time of death, and immediately after death.
His result was 21 grams! in popular culture This experiment, which took an important place, was not accepted in the scientific world due to many inconsistencies.
MacDougall selected six dying patients from a nursing home for his extraordinary experiment.
Four of these patients suffered from tuberculosis, one had diabetes, and the other had an unspecified illness. He weighed the first patient, who did not have much time, on his precision scale. sweat, urine, oxygen He added such losses to his calculation and went on hold.
After waiting for about four hours with heart rate measurements, the patient breathed his last.
When measuring the patient’s body, the weight loss He saw that it was 21 grams. After this patient, he measured other patients in the same way, the loss was again 21 grams. He noticed a loss of 21.3 grams at the time of death in only one patient, but ignored this result because he thought he might not have adjusted the scales well enough.
He tried the similar method this time with 15 dogs.
He found that unlike humans, dogs did not lose any significant weight. If the reason for this dogs may not have souls tied to his mind. This interesting experiment was published in the journal American Medicine in April 1907.
Unsurprisingly, the experiment attracted media attention, but was not taken seriously in the scientific community.
According to the respected medical journal The Lancet; doctor and his assistants, they took the findings in the direction they wanted. MacDougall remained silent for 4 years after this article was published.
In 1911, he took the stage this time with a much crazier idea: He was going to photograph the moment the soul left the body!
Although he made some attempts with the thought that he could achieve this, of course he could not. Nine years after this claim, he died of liver cancer at the age of 42. While waiting for his death, he also examined his own body closely, and “The Most Interesting Death I’ve Ever Watched” as he spoke.
This unscientific experiment nevertheless gained an important place in popular culture.
Although he does not narrate this event, due to the popularity of the claim that the soul has weight, a movie was called “21 Grams”. There are still many people today who think that the soul really is 21 grams.
Sources: 1, 2, 3
RELATED NEWS