What is the source of the claim that at the moment of death a person loses 21 grams of his weight
What would he believe? You, me and all other human beings will lose exactly 21 grams of our weight the moment we die. That's right. were and are not How do I know that? Because that's what the poster for the movie "21 Grams" says, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and starring Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
The film's trailer in the cinema moves quickly, perhaps with the aim of preventing its viewers from trying to guess what amount of body fluids and gases the deceased may part with in a way that will cause him to lose 21 grams of his weight. And soon the question arises: "Is it the human soul that weighs 21 grams?"
"I've been dealing with death for 45 years, and I can say with confidence that it's nonsense," says Robert Stern, a pathologist at the University of California, San Francisco. If so, what is the source of the claim?
Tracing the source of the claim leads to Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Massachusetts who worked in the early 20th century. MacDougall had a strong attraction to death, and he spent much of his career on an almost obsessive hunt for proof of the existence of the soul. McDougall thought that if humans have a soul, it must exist within the body as matter. And this material must have weight.
MacDougall began to test his theory, and in 1907, two years after Albert Einstein formulated the special theory of relativity, he published his findings in the journal Medicine "American".
McDougal's article teaches both about the author and the quality of the studies published by the medical journals at the beginning of the 20th century. MacDougall describes how he turned a hospital bed into a sort of scale that could measure changes in the weight of patients at the moment of their death. To prevent his dying patients from disrupting the data, it was important to McDougall that his experiment be conducted on tuberculosis patients. "I thought it was worth conducting the experiment on people who were dying from a disease that causes considerable exhaustion," he wrote, "a disease in which at the time of death there is minimal, if any, movement of the muscles. In such cases, the scales remain in perfect equilibrium, and any weight loss is recorded."
MacDougall was able to recruit only six dying people for the study, four of them with tuberculosis. Each one was laid in turn on a bed that had been converted into scales and their weight was measured until a few minutes had passed from the moment of their death. Bowel activity or urination at the moment of death did not impair the experiment because all secretions remained on the bed.
Since MacDougall pretended to be a serious scientist, he repeated the experiment - this time with 15 dogs, which, according to his belief, were not blessed with a soul. It's not clear how MacDougall was able to cause the dogs to die without moving the bed, but some researchers suspect he used an effective and brutal cocktail of drugs.
In his article, MacDougall declared that humans lost 21 grams of their weight at the moment of death. The dogs, according to him, did not lose any weight. According to the explanation McDougal gave to the findings, the weight lost is the weight of the human soul, which separated from the body after death.
Before publishing his findings, MacDougall wanted to make sure that his patients' last breaths did not distort the data. Therefore, he lay down on the bed by himself (probably right after the last patient was taken down and the sheets were changed) and blew for several minutes. Then he asked one of his colleagues to do the same. None of them tipped the balance to the extent that they challenged the findings of the experiment.
But McDougal's experiment was of course extremely questionable: the accuracy of the scales he created was poor, there was a large variation in the data obtained and the number of subjects was small. In addition, McDougal was repeatedly asked why the period of time that passed from the moment of death until a change in weight was recorded varied from patient to patient. In his answer the doctor wrote: "The soul leaves the body the moment the last breath is taken. But in people with a weak character, the soul can stay in the body for an extra minute." He later stated: "Before us is an experimental demonstration that the substance whose weight can be measured does indeed leave the body at the moment of death."
McDougal's work was profiled in the New York Times, which also reported on McDougal's hope that it would be possible to take an X-ray of the soul. However, even though the research was documented in a reputable newspaper, it is causing great embarrassment today. "They just don't take him seriously," said pathologist Stern.
Stern noted that bodies lose a lot of weight over time. Intracellular structures called lysosomes release enzymes that break down the body into gases and liquids. "Therefore, in places where there are mass graves there can be explosions caused by the gas created," says Stern. "If decomposition of the bodies had not occurred, everyone who has ever lived on Earth would still be here." And it really is a great subject for a movie.
Based on a story by: Ian Semple Guardian, Walla!, courtesy of the Walla website
