MacDougall’s paper appeared in American Medicine in April 1907. The journal printed four replies and two rejoinders over the next eight months, and between them they contain the only contemporary examination of the experiment by physicians. The exchange is given here in more detail than the entry has room for, because it is where the missing columns of the record were first asked for, and where MacDougall explained why they were missing.
Clarke, May 1907
The first reply came from Augustus P. Clarke of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was about heat. Clarke regretted “that the author did not give in detail the record of temperature (both internal and external) as it occurred in the last hours of the several persons dying from the effects of the various diseases in which there had been at the time of death an apparent lessening of the weight of the body.” It had long been held, he wrote, “that there is more or less elevation of temperature at or soon after death due to the arrest of the circulation and to the failure of the blood to be cooled in its passage through the respiratory tracts. Such fact I have many times been able to verify.”
He had three cases. On 25 July 1906 he had been called to a young man of eighteen, dying of pericarditis, whose temperature by the mouth was 106.2 degrees at eight in the evening, 108 thirty-two minutes later, and 110 twenty-one minutes after that, by which time “the patient had then ceased to breathe and the blood was, of course, no longer receiving the cooling effects of the air through the respiratory passages.” Such a rise, “by the failure of the blood to receive the cooling influences of the air, would have been deemed quite sufficient to account for the rapid loss of three-fourths of an ounce in weight in an inappreciable lapse of time by insensible transudation of fluid, as must have taken place without doubt in one of the cases reported by the author of the paper referred to above. Such a condition would seem to be quite sufficient to account for the sudden loss of weight without having to resort to the necessity of supposing that a distinct entity of a ponderable soul substance had escaped to regions of unknown space.” A married woman of twenty-four, dying of tuberculosis in April 1906, had risen “within a space of less than one hour” from 103.8 to 107.2. An elderly man poisoned by strychnine, in convulsions whose “rapid development of opisthotonus was frightful in the extreme”, had reached 109.4 at his last breath, after which “the surface of the body then seemed relaxed and dry through the internal influences of the great degree of heat within”.
Clarke ended on the larger question. “As to the proof of the immortality of the soul or of a life beyond it must be confessed that science has not as yet offered any help favorable to the conception of that idea. The reality of such an existence, if I may so use the term, can only be indulged in through hope or rather through faith, as St. Paul so graphically urged the doctrine on his followers.”
MacDougall, July 1907
MacDougall’s reply ran to three pages. His patients, he wrote, “passed away in a state of profound asthenia, with progressive respiratory and circulatory failure, with the cold clammy skin, and the cold feeble stream of respiratory air, so common in those dying of long protracted chronic tuberculosis. As Dr. Clarke urges his theory, it seems entirely inadequate to account for the loss of weight in these cases.”
He took Clarke’s physiology apart point by point. The cooling of the blood in the lungs was “so slight as to have little or nothing to do with the temperature of the body”: by Claude Bernard and Liebig, the blood of the right heart was 38.8 degrees centigrade and that of the left 38.6, “and by the time it reaches the aorta it is up again to 38.7”. The rise at death came instead from “the coexisting cardiac failure, the failure of the peripheral circulation, the more or less sudden diminution of blood supply to the skin and the consequent checking of radiation of heat from the skin.” A body that radiated less evaporated less. “It is here that we come to the milk in the cocoanut of Dr. Clarke’s theory.” For the theory to mean anything, a hot body after death would have to lose more water through the lungs and skin than a living one, “in the face of the facts that the carrier of the respiratory moisture—the tidal air—has ceased with the cessation of respiration, and also in the face of the fact that the circulation in the periphery is at an end and the skin is bloodless and no longer secreting moisture”. “High temperature alone does not account for the loss of weight. A loss of weight implies a loss of substance.” The patients “were well blanketed and the sudden loss could not come from evaporation of skin moisture”.
He also described, for the first time, what the rate of loss had done in the last half hour of each case. “In the last 20 or 30 minutes in all the cases this loss diminished quite markedly as the respiration became shallower, and finally when total failure of the respiration and circulation had taken place, a loss of weight took place of such amount and within such a time with all channels of loss closed as to be wholly unaccounted for.” And he conceded the point that mattered least: “Now my hypothesis of soul substance may be fallacious, but it certainly is not to be pushed aside by this high temperature theory of Dr. Clarke’s which does not fit the facts at all and is undoubtedly erroneous.”
O’Malley, November 1907
Austin O’Malley of Philadelphia, an ophthalmologist and the author of a textbook of pastoral medicine, treated the paper as a piece of evidence and counted it. “Dr. MacDougall’s article, drawn from four experiments, three of which are decidedly doubtful, supposes, (1) that his patients were really dead at the moment he observed the loss in weight; that cessation of respiratory muscular action and of the audibility of the heart-sounds signifies death; (2) that because he could not expain the loss of weight, there is no possible explanation; (3) that substance is merely a space-occupying body; (4) that personality cannot exist except in a space-occupying body; (5) that the soul is material.”
On the first he cited a boy who had “died” on an operating table, whose heart had been laid bare three-quarters of an hour later and found “motionless, relaxed, and cold”, and who had then been brought round and had lived twenty-seven hours. “No man on earth has the faintest notion of the exact moment of death.” “I deny that Dr. MacDougall’s patients were dead when the scale-beam dropped, and this decidedly reasonable objection makes his entire argument at least doubtful.” Then the cases. The second, by MacDougall’s own words about the moment of death, “proves nothing finally.” Of the third: “Does this inexplicable second loss suppose the man had two souls? It certainly makes the case useless in the argument.” The fourth MacDougall had rejected himself. Of the fifth: “Did the ponderable soul go back for fifteen minutes? Whether it did or not, this case too is not ad rem.” “So far there is only one case really worth consideration.”
On the second point: “Because Dr. MacDougall, or anyone else, cannot explain the loss of weight he mentions, it by no means follows that there is no explanation other than that the loss supposes the departure of a ponderable soul. Mysteries are apt to clear up into ordinary facts even after very wise scientists have striven with them for ages. A few years ago no man living could explain how a man is infected by yellow fever, but now it is a mere matter of mosquitoes”. And the sentence that answers the whole paper: “If a maiden abandons her lover, and he therefore rapidly loses bodily weight, does the loss of weight in his body represent the girl’s ‘avoirdupois,’ or prove that she is a space-occupying body? That is a case essentially similar to Dr. MacDougall’s experiment.” The rest of the article is scholastic philosophy on substance, extension and the simplicity of the soul, and ends: “The soul is a formally unextended principle, and no insistence will ever put legs on it.”
Clarke, December 1907
Clarke came back with the list. “It is also regrettable that the author does not give in exact figures the weight of his patients, since he seems to have weighed them after a method he had devised. If he had reported the exact weight of each patient at various times, we should have known what was the full amount of percentage of loss of weight as each or any one of his patients ceased to breathe. Another fatal defect in his report is, that he fails to tell what was the temperature of the room or rooms in which death occurred, whether the apartments were favorable to a rapid escape and diffusion of moisture. He says nothing about the humidity of the surroundings or of the barometric pressure of the atmosphere. He makes no remark as to the time of the year, whether his weighing was done in January or in August, or in any other month.”
He had an answer for the dogs too, from “Mr. Stonehenge, a high English authority” on the animal. A dog sweats hardly at all; “the tongue, however, is the grand means of carrying off heat by evaporation”, and at the moment of death a dog that stops panting stops losing water, “and not because his canines, as he would have us believe, had thereby been proved to have no ponderable soul substance.” He had, he added, attended “nearly 400 autopsies”, and the deep organs kept their heat for a day.
MacDougall, December 1907
MacDougall’s last word is the only place he gives the scale’s make and capacity and the weights of his patients, and the place where he says why he had not. “I have in my possession the weights of my subjects, but as the question to be determined by the experiment was not the weights of the subjects, but the rate of loss of weight while dying, and whether any unusual loss of weight occurred at or after death, I did not deem it necessary to burden my original article with that matter. Whether the dying subject weighed 70 or 80 or 90 or 100 pounds (and these were about the average weights) to begin with, had no bearing whatever on the question to be determined so long as we knew the weight of the patient when the experiment began, and recorded the progressive loss as the experiment proceeded.” Of the room and the weather: “when I say that these were practically uniform for each test by itself, and throughout the whole duration of each test, it will be seen at once that it is not essential to know what they were”.
Then the scale. “The balance used was the Fairbank’s standard scale of the kind used for weighing silk, with a maximum capacity of 300 pounds and showing a variation of a quarter of an ounce. The particular scale used was sensitive to one-fifth of an ounce with about 200 pounds as the combined weight of frame, bed, patient, and clothing. The combined weight never exceeded 206 pounds, so I was well within the limits of my scale.”
He gave Clarke the dogs: “To the doctor’s theory of the cessation of weight loss in the canine at death I give ready assent … Here the doctor is on solid ground, the theory corresponds with the facts in the case, but all that has no explanation in it of the unusual and unaccountable loss in the human subject, for which his high temperature theory was put forth.” And he closed the discussion. “I had not intended to enter into any further discussion of the subject, for the reason that such discussion is fruitless and barren, a mere championing of opinions, when it were far better to appeal to nature herself and get facts for arguments. Since temperature records have not been taken in conjunction with the weighing of human beings at death, there is here an opportunity for Dr. Clarke, or others who are of the opinion that temperature is a factor of any importance in affecting the results in my experiments, to make such modifications of the experiment as are deemed necessary, and discover for themselves the answer that nature would give.”
Nobody took the opportunity.
The verdict a century later
In 2010 Masayoshi Ishida went through the exchange with the physiology and the thermodynamics of a later century, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Clarke’s first claim, that a body heats up when the lungs stop cooling the blood, he found simply wrong: when a person dies, heat generation stops and heat loss continues, so “there will be no part in the body where its temperature rises upon death”, and a body with no circulation cools with a time constant of more than four hours. Clarke’s second claim needed twenty-one grams of sweat to appear on the skin of a blanketed, bloodless body and evaporate in a few seconds, “a very rapid evaporation, similar to what would occur with a hot heated metal surface”, and even then the vapour “would very probably stay within the bed clothing to contribute to the apparent weight of the patient”. “Therefore, Clarke’s claims (i) and (ii) are refuted.” On the scale, Ishida’s answer was the one MacDougall had given: a sensitivity of two-tenths of an ounce on 200 pounds is one part in eleven thousand, “well over” what was needed to see twenty-one grams, and “one can say that MacDougall’s scales had a good sensitivity for his experimental purpose.”
What Ishida could not supply, any more than Clarke could extract, was the rest of the row: the weights, the temperatures, the month, the room. MacDougall was right that his scale could see what he said it saw, and Clarke was right that nothing in the paper lets anyone else see it. The argument about heat was settled a hundred years late in MacDougall’s favour, and it settled nothing, because the thing Clarke had asked for was never the physiology. It was the record.