Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  I managed to find only two other references to scientists rummaging around in corpses looking for souls. One comes from the Midrash, a collection of ancient rabbinical commentaries on the Torah. The Midrash makes reference to a single indestructible bone, called the luz. The luz is shaped like a chickpea (or an almond, depending on which rabbi you listen to) and located at the top of the spine (or the bottom, depending on which rabbi you listen to). From this bone, the Midrash states, a person is reconcocted after death. It’s the soul bone.

  The Midrash includes a description from the Torah of an experiment to prove the unique indestructibility of the luz. The project was carried out by Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah upon being confronted by the Roman emperor Hadrian. “Prove it to me,” Hadrian is quoted as saying. So the rabbi did. “He had one brought….” (Like he just turned to some underling: Smetak! Fetch me a luz!) “He put it in fire, but it was not burnt, he put it in a mill but it was not ground. He placed it on an anvil and struck it with a hammer; the anvil split and the hammer was broken but all this had no effect on the luz.”

  Needless to say, there was much chatter about the luz over the centuries, and when the science of anatomy began to gain momentum in the Middle Ages, its practitioners sought to find it. They nominated, among other bones, the coccyx, the sacrum, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, the wormian bones of the skull, and the tiny sesamoid bones of the big toe. Of course, these bones are all easily destroyed, and the anatomists eventually decided it was a matter best left to the philosophers. The famed Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, having spent an afternoon mucking around with a set of sesamoid bones, more or less laid the matter to rest: “We should attach no importance whatever,” he wrote in De humani corporis fabrica, “to the miraculous and occult powers ascribed to the internal ossicle of the right great toe.”

  Contemporary rabbinical discussion of the luz is harder to come by. On the website Ask the Rabbi, a mohel from Paris posted an e-mail seeking information about the luz. The rabbi’s reply confirmed the bone’s alleged indestructibility and added that it has been described as “having within it many intertwined spider-like blood vessels.” He referred the mohel to a Dr. Eli Temstet of Paris for more information. I e-mailed the mohel to see what he’d found out. “Dr. Eli Temstet of Paris has gone to a better world,” came the reply. “Now, he sure knows where and what exactly is the luz.” I sent an e-mail to Ask the Rabbi. Was there a paper on the spider-like blood vessels of the luz? The rabbi did not Answer the Writer. I consulted a book on Talmudic medicine, but no mention was made of the spidery veins of the soul bone.*

  The very first person to poke around for a soul in a human cadaver was the third-century B.C. physician Herophilus, of Alexandria. Herophilus is thought to be the first person in history to have dissected human cadavers for the purpose of scientific enlightenment. As such, he bagged a lot of anatomical discoveries. One of these was the four chambers, or ventricles, of the brain. He believed that the soul was headquartered in the fourth one. Why was Herophilus looking around for a soul inside a dead man, especially given that Egyptians believed in an afterworld† for souls to retire to? I can’t tell you for sure, but I can tell you that Herophilus was rumored to have dissected live humans as well. Two colleagues accused him of vivisecting hundreds of criminals. Perhaps his soul-related aspirations explain his poor table manners.

  If your goal was to pinpoint the soul, it obviously made more sense to experiment on the living than on the dead. The simplest plan of action would be to systematically scramble, excise, or otherwise disable the likely structures and watch to see if the lights went out. And this, more or less, is what got done. Like Descartes, most scientists had zeroed in on the brain. (From early on, observations of personality changes caused by head injuries suggested a link between brain and self.) Galen was one of the earliest of the neuro-vivisectors; he experimented with cutting (and getting on) the nerves of his neighbors’ pigs. Based on this work, he decided that the soul was situated in the substance of the brain and not, as Herophilus had maintained, in the ventricles.

  Leonardo da Vinci further narrowed it down. In 1996, McGill University professor of neurosurgery Rolando Del Maestro curated an exhibition called “Leonardo da Vinci: The Search for the Soul.” In the materials for the exhibit, Del Maestro describes a 1487 manuscript in which Leonardo made notes about a passage he had read in a book about the Carthaginian War. The passage describes the quickest way to kill an injured elephant: by pounding a stake between the animal’s ears at the top of the spinal column. Intrigued, Leonardo took to pithing frogs in a similar manner. “The frog instantly dies when its spinal medulla is perforated,” Del Maestro quotes Leonardo as having written. “And previously it lived without head, without heart or any interior organs, or intestines or skin. Here, therefore, it appears, lies the foundation of movement and life.” (I think that what he meant is that the skinned, gutted, headless, heartless frogs lived for a little while.)

  Only one soul-seeking man of science carried out this sort of cavalier slice-and-see experimentation on a living human being. As the king’s surgeon and the founder of France’s Royal Academy of Surgery, Gigot de La Peyronie could pretty well do what he felt like. In 1741, he published a paper entitled “Observations by Which One Tries to Discover the Part of the Brain Where the Soul Exercises Its Functions.” The subject was a sixteen-year-old boy whose skull had been cracked by a rock. After three days of worsening symptoms, the youth fell unconscious. La Peyronie “opened up his head” and found a suppurating abscess deep down inside the brain, at the corpus callosum. He drained the wound, taking care to measure the runoff, which amounted to “about the volume of a hen’s egg.” As soon as the pus* that had weighed upon the corpus callosum was drained, he wrote, the coma lifted. La Peyronie noted that when the cavity had refilled with ooze, the youth fell unconscious again. He reemptied it, and again the boy awoke. The corpus callosum, he reasoned, must be the seat of the soul. Just to be sure, La Peyronie decided to undertake a little experiment. He filled a syringe with saline and injected it directly into the newly drained wound. As predicted, the boy lost consciousness. And was brought back to his senses when La Peyronie pumped the water back out.

  La Peyronie found confirmation of his conclusions in three patients who had lost consciousness and died following head injuries and then been found during autopsy to have abscesses in the vicinity of the corpus callosum. One of the abscess pockets, that of a soldier whose horse had kicked him, was here again described as being “of the size and shape of a hen’s egg”—clearly the “bigger-than-a-breadbox” of its day.

  Autopsies also enabled La Peyronie to rule out Descartes’s competing claim that the soul hung its hat in the pineal gland. La Peyronie had autopsied patients discovered to be missing the gland entirely or in whom it appeared to have petrified. “Elle ne réside pas dans la glande pinéale,” he declared. I find a certain arrogance suffuses both La Peyronie’s writing and his deeds. If only he could know that today, as regards historic Frenchmen known to Americans, La Peyronie doesn’t hold a flame to Le Petomane,* the Moulin Rouge “fartiste,” whom no one should hold a flame to anyway.

  La Peyronie was the last of a breed—a lone holdout in the anatomical search for the soul. Most of the early neuroanatomists had come to see that the self was too complex, too multifaceted, to be housed in or operated by a single biological entity. Like the Soviet Union after Gorbachev, the once broad and uniform-seeming soul began to splinter into dozens of smaller republics. Through a combination of unpleasant and often contradictory animal studies—living brains pokered, ablated, and hacked—and autopsy studies that sought to match brain abnormalities with dominant personality features, the men of science began mapping the specialized duties of the brain’s real estate, a project that continues to this day.

  Of all the brain’s early cartographers, none was quite so thorough as Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed to have located twenty-seven distinct “organs” of the human brain, each corr
esponding to a specific trait or faculty. By all accounts a gifted physician and anatomist, Gall succeeded in pinpointing the brain’s language center and that of our memory for words. His other “organs” were rather more questionable. For instance: The Organ of Poetical Talent. The Organ of Metaphysics. And, my personal favorite: The Organ for the Instinct for Property-Owning and Stocking Up on Food. Gall’s organs landed him in hot water with the church, which labeled him a heretic for teaching that man had multiple souls, a charge Gall denied.

  Gall was led astray in part by his unconventional methodology. The swift decomposition of brains precluded their lengthy study, so Gall took to examining skulls, both of the living and the dead. He reasoned that if an organ of the brain was particularly well developed, it would put pressure upon the cranium and raise a bump that could be seen or felt through the hair. (Phrenology—a mass-market popularization of his theories—had the masses feeling each other’s heads and galling Gall for decades to follow.) Gall amassed a collection of 221 skulls, which traveled with him on his lecture circuit, exasperating porters and alarming nosy bellhops. He also owned, at last count, 102 plaster casts of human heads, many of which he’d made himself. The heads were casts of people he met in his travels whose character seemed obviously dominated by one or two strong traits and whose skull bore a bulge in the appropriate spot: evidence for his theories. Skull #5491, for instance, belonged to a Mr. Weilamann, the director of a portable hydrogen gas generator* company, and showed a notable bump over the Organ for Mechanical Sense, Construction, and Architecture.

  Gall was quite devoted to his collection. To track down examples of the Organ of the Penchant for Murder and Carnivorousness, for instance, he took to wandering through prisons, looking for murderers with ridges above the ears. Lunatic asylums were another fruitful stop for Gall and his plaster craft. The catalogue of Gall’s collection contains dozens of items like #5494: “Copy in plaster of the skull of a total idiot.”*

  For the Organ of Poetical Talent, Gall resorted to fondling marble busts of the great poets. As evidence for the location of the Organ of Belief in the Existence of God, he cites a series of Raphael paintings in which Christ appears to have a noticeable rise at the crest of his cranium, as though Satan had bopped him over the head with his trident. Had Gall gone potty? Possibly. Here is his evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation. He knew of a young clockmaker who, when he “ejaculated by onanism,” would lose consciousness for an instant and suffer convulsive movements of the head and a violent pain in the back of the neck. “The idea couldn’t escape me,” writes Gall in Sur les fonctions du cerveau, “that there must be a connection between the functions of physical love and the cerebral parts in the nape of the neck.” Then again, perhaps there is a connection between violent convulsive head movements and neck pain.

  As further evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation, Gall cites a young widow who admitted that since childhood she had felt “strong desires that were impossible to resist” and during these moments the nape of her neck burned. Gall describes placing his hand on her young widowly nape during one of these burning-desire episodes and discovering “a very considerable rounded prominence,” possibly one of several going on in the room.

  Item #19.216 of the Gall collection is the skull of Franz Joseph Gall. Gall disciple N. J. Ottin notes that “on the occiput, the tendency toward sex was very marked.”

  From Gall’s day onward, the soul began to drift away from the provinces of anatomy and neurology and off into airier domains: religion, philosophy, parapsychology. The men of medicine were through with the soul—with one terrifically odd exception.

  3

  How to Weigh a Soul

  What happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale

  IT WAS A pretty place to die. The mansion on Blue Hill Avenue was the showpiece of the Dorchester, Massachusetts, estate known as Grove Hall. Four stories tall, with a porticoed porch and cliques of indolent shade trees, the mansion had been home to T. K. Jones, a wealthy merchant in the China trade. In 1864, it was bought by a physician-cum-faith-healer named Charles Cullis, who turned it into the Consumptives’ Home—a charitable operation for late-stage tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) patients. With the discovery of antibiotics sixty years off, prayer was as useful a treatment as any then on offer. TB patients were routinely packed off to sanitariums, ostensibly to partake of rest “cures,” but mainly to keep them from spreading the disease.

  Had you been visiting the Consumptives’ Home in April 1901, you might have been witness to a curious undertaking. A plump, meek-looking man of thirty-four, wearing wire-frame glasses and not as much hair as he once did, was stooped over the platform of an ornate Fairbanks scale, customizing the device with wooden supports and what appeared to be an army-style cot. The scale was an oversized commercial model, for weighing silk—no doubt a holdover from Jones’s mercantile days.

  Clearly something unorthodox was afoot. Though weight loss was a universal undertaking at the Consumptives’ Home, no one needed a commercial scale to track it.

  The man with the hammer was Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon and physician who lived in a mansion of his own, in nearby Haverhill. Macdougall was acquainted with the Consumptives’ Home attending physician, but he himself was not on staff. Nor was he treating any of the patients, or even praying for them. Quite the opposite; Macdougall was literally—perhaps even a little eagerly—waiting for them to die.

  For the preceding four years of his life, Duncan Macdougall had been hatching a plan to prove the existence of the human soul. If, as most religions held, people leave their bodies behind at death and persist in the form of a soul, then mustn’t this soul occupy space? “It is unthinkable,” wrote Macdougall, “that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that which does not occupy space.” And if they occupy space, he reasoned, they must have weight. “The question arose in my mind: Why not weigh a man at the very moment of death?” If the beam moved, and the body lost even a fraction of an ounce, he theorized, that loss might represent the soul’s departure.

  Macdougall enlisted the help of two fellow physicians, Drs. Sproull and Grant, who chose not—or possibly weren’t invited—to put their names on the research paper. The plan was to install a cot on the scale platform and then install a dying consumptive on the cot. Death from consumption is a still, quiet affair, and so it fit Macdougall’s conditions “to a nicety,” as he put it. “A consumptive dying after a long illness wasting his energies, dies with scarcely a movement to disturb the beam, their bodies are also very light, and we can be forewarned for hours that a consumptive is dying.” I found his enthusiasm at once endearing and a little troubling. I imagined him addressing the ward as he canvassed for volunteers. (Macdougall wrote in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research that he secured his subjects’ consent some weeks before their deaths.) You people are just perfect for this project. A, You’re easy to lift, B, you’re practically comatose when you go…. Who knows what the consumptives made of it, or whether they were too out of it to know what he was asking.

  At 5:30 p.m. on April 10, 1901, Patient 1’s death—“my opportunity,” Macdougall called it—was declared imminent. A male of ordinary build and “standard American temperament,” he was wheeled from the ward and lifted onto the scale like a depleted bolt of silk. Macdougall summoned his partners. For three hours and forty minutes, the physicians watched the man fade. In place of the more usual bedside attitudes of grief and pity, the men assumed an air of breathless, intent expectancy. I imagine you see this on the faces of NASA engineers during countdown and, possibly, vultures.

  One doctor watched the man’s chest; another, the movements of his face. Macdougall himself kept his eyes on the scale’s indicator. “Suddenly, coincident with death,” wrote Macdougall, “the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of a
n ounce.” Which is, yes, twenty-one grams. Hollywood metricized its reference to the event for the simple reason that 21 Grams sounds better. Who’s going to go see a movie called Point Seven Five Ounces?

  Over the years, Macdougall repeated the experiment on five more patients. A paper summarizing his findings ran in the journal American Medicine in 1907. In the months that followed, dubious M.D.s launched their criticisms in lengthy letters to the editor. Macdougall countered them all. One correspondent pointed out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the loss was perhaps urine and/or feces. Macdougall patiently replied that if this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon the scale. Someone else suggested that the dying patients’ final exhalation might have contributed to the drop in weight. To prove that it hadn’t, Macdougall gamely climbed onto the cot and exhaled “as forcibly as possible,” while Sproull watched the scale. No change was observed.

  The most likely culprit was something called “insensible loss”: body weight that is continually being lost through evaporating perspiration and water vapor in one’s breath. Macdougall claimed to have accounted for this. His first patient, he wrote, lost water weight at the rate of an ounce per hour, far too slowly for insensible loss to explain the sudden three-quarter-ounce drop at death.

  THE HISTORICAL AUTHORITY on insensible weight loss is a Paduan physiologist named Sanctorius. Known humdrumly as the “founding father of metabolic balance studies,” Sanctorius coined the term “insensible perspiration” in 1690, in a diverting volume entitled Medicina statica.* To aid him in his research, Sanctorius devised an experimental scale of his own. He suspended a platform on a massive steelyard scale. The platform held a bench with a hole cut out of the center of it and a bucket underneath it, and in front of the platform stood a supper table: Out box and In box. Sanctorius sat himself down on the platform, enjoyed a meal, and then sat around on the scale for eight hours, availing himself of the bucket when needed. He then weighed, to use his exuberantly capitalized phrasings, “the Excrements of the Guts”—observing on an unrelated tangent that “the thick ones are lighter and swim.” Sanctorius found that a small portion of the food weight remained unaccounted for, i.e., wasn’t down there in the bucket. This he ascribed to evaporated sweat and breath vapor, which he collectively dubbed insensible perspiration.