The experiment reached the public before it reached print, and it reached the public in a form its author never wrote. The Boston Sunday Post had it on 10 March 1907 under “Existence of ‘soul’ tested by doctors”; the New York Times had it on the Monday as a “Special to The New York Times” datelined Boston the day before; and within ten days the wire version was in the weekly papers of the South. What follows is that version as two of them printed it, The Abbeville Press and Banner of Abbeville, South Carolina, on 20 March, and The Horry Herald of Conway, South Carolina, on 21 March. The two settings differ only in misprints, and where one is garbled the other has been followed. The Times’s own opening paragraph is the same text in all but a word or two.
The story as printed
CAN THIS BE SO? Is It Possible to Accurately Weigh the Soul of Man? CLAIMS IT WAS DONE. Dr. Macdougall, of Haverhill, Mass., Tells of Experiments. He Says Loss of Weight of Body Was Recorded, and the Scales Showed an Ounce Gone in One Case Right After Death.
That the human soul has a definite weight, which can be determined when it passes from the body is the belief of Dr. Duncan Macdougall, a reputable physician of Haverhill, Mass. He is the head of a research society which for six years has been experimenting in this field. With him he says, have been associated four other physicians.
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.
The method followed was to place a dying patient in bed upon one of the platforms of a pair of scales made expressly for the experiments, and then to balance this weight by placing an equal weight in the opposite platform. These scales were constructed delicately enough to be sensitive to a weight of less than one tenth of an ounce.
In every case after death the platform opposite the one in which lay the subject of the test fell suddenly so Dr. Macdougall says. The figures on the dial index indicated the diminishment of weight. Dr. Macdougall told of the results of his experiments as follows:
“Four other physicians under my direction made the first test upon a patient dying of tuberculosis. This man was one of the ordinary type of the usual American temperament, neither particularly high strung nor of marked phlegmatic disposition. We placed him a few hours preceding death, upon a scale platform, which I had constructed and which was accurately balanced. Four hours later with five doctors in attendance he died.
“The instant life ceased the opposite scale pan fell with a suddenness that was astonishing; as if something had been suddenly lifted from the body. Immediately all the usual deductions were made for physical loss of weight, and it was discovered that there was still a full ounce of weight unaccounted for.
“I submitted another subject afflicted with the same disease and nearing death to the same experiment. He was a man of much the same temperament as the preceding patient and of about the same physical type. The same result happened at the passing of his life. The instant the heart ceased to beat there was a sudden and almost uncanny diminishment in weight.
“As experiments, each physician in attendance made figures of his own concerning the loss, and, at a consultation, these figures were compared. The unaccountable loss continued to be shown.
“But this was less remarkable than what took place in the third case, the subject was that of a man of 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 others faces silently, shaking their heads in 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 the weight, which was soon found to be the same as that of the preceding experiments.
“I believe that in this case, that of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action, that the soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom. There is no other way of accounting for it, and it is what might be expected to happen in a man of the subject’s temperament.
“Three other cases were tried, including that of a woman, and in each it was established that a weight of from one-half to a full ounce departed from the body at the moment of expiration of life.”
What the letters say instead
Set the story beside the letters MacDougall had written to Richard Hodgson in 1901 and 1902, and the paper he published in April 1907, and almost every particular changes.
The society and the four physicians. There is no research society in any letter or paper. There is one colleague, a Dr. Sproull, who put the beam at balance while MacDougall breathed on the bed, listened to the second patient’s heart, and otherwise does not appear. The “five doctors in attendance” at the first death are two.
The pair of scales. There was one scale, a Fairbanks standard platform scale of the kind used for weighing silk, with a beam and a sliding weight, not a pair of pans with “an equal weight in the opposite platform”, and there was no “dial index”. Its sensitivity was two-tenths of an ounce, which MacDougall tested and wrote down, not “less than one tenth of an ounce”.
The full ounce. The first patient’s loss was three-fourths of an ounce. No case in the letters lost exactly “a full ounce” at the moment of death; the third lost half an ounce at death and an ounce “a few minutes later”, with the scale jarred by a stethoscope in between.
The second patient. The story’s second case is “a man of much the same temperament as the preceding patient”, in whom the loss came “the instant the heart ceased to beat”. The letters’ second case was “of a totally different temperament from the first”, stopped breathing at ten past four in the morning, twitched for fifteen minutes with no loss, and then sank slowly over another fifteen, in a death so gradual that “we had great doubt, from the ordinary evidence to say just at what minute he died.”
The phlegmatic man and the minute. No letter or paper has a patient whose soul “remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom.” The nearest thing is the fifth case, in which the beam dropped at once and then, when brought back up with weights and the weights removed, “did not sink back to stay for fully fifteen minutes”; or the second case’s thirty minutes. The sentence about temperament is the one the papers quoted most, and it is nobody’s but the reporter’s.
The woman. “Three other cases were tried, including that of a woman, and in each it was established that a weight … departed from the body.” The woman was the fourth case, dying in diabetic coma, and MacDougall threw her out: “our scales were not finely balanced”, “there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work”, and “I regard this test as of no value.”
The six years. This is the one figure the story has right. The first case was on 10 April 1901, and MacDougall told Hyslop that the matter had been “securely kept in for five or six years”.
What it did
MacDougall’s letter to James Hyslop of 13 March 1907 is the only record of how the story got out, and it does not say. “It is unfortunate that they have received publicity first through the newspapers, as it was my intention to collect the data and complete my argument in a paper to be made public before some scientific body. That I judge, is out of the question now.” He had “lately become connected with a hospital and was thereby winning the confidence of those in charge, and hoped that within this year I might be able to resume my experiments. This premature newspaper publication ends that hope.” Hyslop printed the letter, and the Hodgson correspondence, in May, with the note that “an unauthenticated publication of his attempts, with the usual distortion that everything gets in the papers, has resulted in this prompt effort to correct the misrepresentation.”
The correction appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and in American Medicine. The story had appeared everywhere else. Of the two, it is the story that survived: the full ounce became twenty-one grams by way of the three-quarters that the paper restored, and the soul that paused in a sluggish man before it noticed it was free has been retold for more than a century as something Duncan MacDougall observed.