Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  Sanctorius calculated that an eight-pound intake of meat and drink will, over one day, yield five pounds of insensible perspiration—or an average of three ounces of sweat and breath vapor lost per hour: three times the rate Macdougall observed. At one point Sanctorius describes the digestion of “a supper of eight pounds.”† It soon became clear there was little overlap between the dripping trencherman of Sanctorius’s day and Macdougall’s dry little consumptives. I skipped ahead to Section VI, which was all about the effects of immoderate coitus on insensible perspiration. Sanctorius effected the quaint habit of presenting his findings in the form of aphorisms. As in, “Aphorism XXXIX: Such a Motion of a Body as resembles that of a Dog in Coition, is more hurtful than a bare Emission of Semen; for the latter wearies only the internal Parts, but the other tires both the Bowels and the Nerves.” Or “Aphorism XL: To use Coition standing, after a Meal, is hurtful; because as it is upon a full Meal, it hinders the Offices of the Bowels.” Sanctorius preached that by obstructing insensible perspiration, immoderate sex led to everything from “Palpitations in the Eyebrows and Joynts” to a hardening of the tunicles of the eyes—and here we have what I surmise to be the original striking of the masturbation-makes-you-go-blind myth. Sanctorius preached a carnal moderation that seemed almost killjoy—all the more so for the book’s wanton promotion of oysters as sources “of the greatest possible nourishment.”

  TO GET TO THE bottom of the insensible weight loss conundrum—is it an ounce per hour, as Macdougall calculated, or is it three?—I called America’s modern-day Sanctorius, Eric Ravussin. Ravussin, currently with the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, used to run metabolic chamber studies for the National Institutes of Health. He, too, has measured insensible water loss during sleep—by tucking volunteers into beds on platform scales inside the chamber. His findings came in right beside Macdougall’s: about an ounce per hour. Macdougall was right: It would be hard to imagine insensible water loss as the force behind an instantaneous drop of three-fourths of an ounce.

  Ravussin had no idea what could have caused the abrupt weight loss. He referred me to a book by Max Kleiber, called The Fire of Life: An Introduction to Animal Energetics. Though a tad formula-heavy for the likes of me, the book is as diverting in spots as was Sanctorius’s. We learn, for instance, that the “extra-large vagina of the Brahman cow is an effective organ for heat dissipation.” In a similar vein, Schmidt-Nielsen “observed that a camel’s rectal temperature may rise during a day from 34.2 to 40.7 C,” though I doubt that, strictly speaking, observation alone did the trick. Sometimes you have to get right in there, as Kleiber himself did in 1945, calculating “the insensible weight loss of cows in pasture by preventing their water and food intake with a muzzle and collecting and weighing all feces and urine.” I skimmed the entire book, looking for some reference to a sudden weight drop at death. I found nothing. There is only so much one can do. In the words of Max Kleiber, “If we insisted on meeting all our fuel needs with eggs, we would soon reach the end.” Or something.

  SO HOW ARE we to explain Macdougall’s befuddling finding? I have some theories for your consideration.

  Theory the First: Duncan Macdougall was a nutter. I was an early supporter of the nutter theory, based largely on the fact that Macdougall was a member of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society. He wrote his medical school thesis on the Law of Similars, the underlying principle of homeopathy—basically Like Cures Like. I don’t know what homeopathists get up to nowadays, but back in the movement’s infancy it was nutter central. The homeopathists’ bible, A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, is a three-volume compendium of plants, animals, and minerals, and the symptoms they produce if you ingest them, which homeopathists did a lot of, perhaps accounting for the nutter situation. The central tenet was that substances that cause healthy people to get certain symptoms can cure diseases with these same symptoms. The early homeopathists spent years dosing themselves and their patients and friends with every substance they could get hold of, and carefully cataloguing the reported symptoms. I can’t vouch for the movement’s contributions to the healing arts—without control groups or placebos, the Materia work is meaningless by modern research standards—but I must commend their flair for language. For example, we have alumina causing “dreams of horses, of quarrels, of vexations” and a “tingling on the face, as if it were covered with a white of egg dried.” Agnus castus causes “odor before the nose, like herrings or musk,” as well as “feeble erections” and—it almost goes without saying—“great sadness.” And then there is chamomile, said to cause the symptom “cannot be civil to the doctor.”

  But at the time Duncan Macdougall went to medical school, in 1893, homeopathy was not considered a fringe branch of medicine. About half the country’s medical schools—including Macdougall’s alma mater, Boston University—still taught the homeopathic approach to healing. (BU had dropped it by the early 1920s.) The point is, plenty of mainstream, straight-ahead physicians practiced homeopathy in Macdougall’s day.

  Also working against the touchy-feely flake theory are the plentiful examples of Macdougall’s consistent toe-the-line geekdom. He was class president and class orator at BU. A 1907 article in the Boston Sunday Post flatly stated that Macdougall was a believer in neither spiritualism nor psychic phenomena. A Haverhill Evening Gazette piece described him as “hard-headed and practical.” Greg Laing, head of the History Room at the Haverhill Public Library, recalls visiting the Macdougall household with his parents as a boy, so I asked him about the good doctor’s nutter potential. (Macdougall had died by then, but his widow and son were still living.) “God, no,” said Laing. “They were such grim, straitlaced people. Really and truly, they were not esoterically inclined.” I phoned Olive Macdougall, the widow of Macdougall’s only grandchild. Though her husband never knew his grandfather, Olive confirmed the family’s decidedly nonmystical bent. Her father-in-law, Duncan’s son, was a banker and lawyer.

  The writer of Duncan Macdougall’s Gazette obituary tried to foist a little jollity on the man, but it was a thin effort: “He was cheerful in the sickroom and some of his sickroom phrases and words of encouragement remain on the tongues of his patients. A few of his sickroom phrases were: ‘Don’t you worry, my gal, everything will be all right’ and ‘Don’t you worry and you’ll get well in a bigger hurry.’”

  Macdougall was neither madman nor visionary. What he was, I’m guessing, was a henpecked little man in need of attention. Greg Laing described Macdougall’s wife Mary as “a battleaxe of monumental proportion.” (Perhaps a chamomile tea drinker.) “I don’t think she had the slightest respect or interest in her husband’s project.” Macdougall got his strokes from his work. As far as I can tell, he made a habit of calling up the local papers to garner laurels where he could. “Dr. Macdougall Becomes Poet,” overstates the headline when some limp doggerel ran in Life. “Dr. Macdougall Wins Great Fame,” blusters another, after England’s navy agreed to have its Royal Marine Bands play Macdougall’s lurching composition “The British Tar’s Song.” (Macdougall’s nephew had a contact at the Admiralty, whom he deluged with 1,800 copies of the song.)

  Theory the Second: Macdougall’s experimental protocols were as lame as his poetry. Let’s look a little closer at his findings.

  Macdougall weighed six patients in all, but only the first, the one described earlier, stands as a strong example of the phenomenon. Macdougall threw out Patient 6’s data because the man died just as they had put him on the cot and were adjusting the beam. Number 4’s data he discounted because, Macdougall wrote in American Medicine, “our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work.” The doctor makes several references to “friction on the part of officials,” and states that only the first patient was run under ideal conditions, i.e., sans friction. He doesn’t specify what form this friction took, but if it affected the tests to the extent that some were thrown out, it seems reasonable to as
sume that the officials were there in the room, hectoring Macdougall or trying to bring a halt to what he was doing. Hardly ideal conditions for a test that requires concentration and enough quiet to listen for a heartbeat.

  That leaves four subjects. With the exception of Number 1, the data for all were compromised in one way or another. Number 2 stopped breathing at 4:10 a.m., but the scale didn’t budge for another fifteen minutes (whereupon it registered a half-ounce drop). “We had great doubt, from the ordinary evidence,” writes Macdougall in his American Medicine paper, “to say just what moment he died.” If you can’t tell when the man died, you can’t very well claim that he lost a half ounce at the moment of death.

  Number 3’s weight loss happened in two phases: a half-ounce loss at the moment of death, and then an additional loss of an entire ounce a few minutes later. Macdougall explains that the second loss might have been caused by a jarring of the scale, caused when one of his colleagues listened to the subject’s heart. If pressing a stethoscope to a patient’s chest disturbs the balance, as of course it would, then how did Macdougall and his colleagues presume to know the moment of death in any of these cases?

  Number 5’s data were tainted by a peculiarity of the scale. Following a three-eighths-ounce loss, three-eighths ounces of weight was added to the scale to bring it back to zero; however, the beam didn’t budge for fifteen minutes. Macdougall had no explanation. Was his scale dodgy? Did Fairbanks make a reliable scale? Was it really accurate to one-fifth of an ounce? Where was a Fairbanks scale historian when you needed one?

  PEGGY PEARL OVERSEES the Historical Collection of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where Franklin Fairbanks began manufacturing scales in 1830. The collection includes 30 or so antique Fairbanks scales, as well as farm implements, “tools of yesteryear,” 103 years of Northern New England Weather Center records, and the Carlton Felch diaries. Peggy fielded my call with a vigor that suggested things were pretty quiet around the Historical Collection office. The Fairbanks company’s scales, she said, were ubiquitous from 1830 through the first half of the twentieth century. They were the Rolls-Royce of platform scales. When I told her Macdougall used a silk scale with a capacity of 300 pounds, she faxed me two pages of Fairbanks Silk Scales from a Macdougall-era catalogue.

  “It combines great sensitiveness with the increase in capacity and platform,” said the proud Fairbanks copy. “Very handsome in appearance.” Indeed, as Macdougall had said, his scale was accurate to one-fifth of an ounce. I told Peggy the story of Macdougall and the dying consumptives, hoping she might have some nugget of Fairbanks scale minutiae that would explain the good doctor’s three-quarter-ounce drop. She initially wondered whether the platform might have been inlaid, in which case, you couldn’t have a cot sticking out over the sides of the platform without rendering the results, as she put it, “screwy.” But the scale in the drawing had a standard suspension platform.

  “That’s about as far as I can take you,” said Peggy. You could hear the disappointment in her voice. Peggy Pearl could tell me what the weather was on April 10, 1901, and she could tell me what Carlton Felch was up to that day, but she could not tell me whether Macdougall’s cot contraption had somehow compromised the Fairbanks’s renowned accuracy.

  MACDOUGALL SEEMED AWARE of his study’s weaknesses, and he encouraged others to try to extend and replicate his work. He wanted to do more trials himself, but was stymied by the earlier-cited frictions with officials. Overtures to “positioned and entrenched scientific authorities” at other facilities, he writes in a letter to R. Hodgson of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), were met by rebuffs. His best bet would have been the ASPR itself. Indeed, the ASPR’s scientific officer, Hereward Carrington, upon hearing of Macdougall’s study, wrote at length and with great gusto, in an issue of the society’s journal, about the possibility of outfitting a condemned prisoner in an airtight glass hood, and placing him, electric chair and all, onto a platform scale.

  In the end, Macdougall resorted to weighing some dogs on a scale he set up in his barn. Owing to the difficulty of finding dogs dying from a disease that rendered them exhausted and motionless, he immobilized and then killed them via injection—fifteen dogs in all. Not one evinced a drop in weight as it died. Macdougall’s spin on this rather striking batch of conflicting data was that of the churchgoing Christian: Animals don’t have souls—or anyway, sayeth the Bible, not the eternal variety—and therefore we should expect this.

  Not everyone in the soul-weighing business would agree with Macdougall there. Ten years after the American Medicine paper was published, a physics teacher at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School self-published a book called The Physical Theory of the Soul, which included a chapter detailing his adventures in mouse-soul-weighing. H. LaV. Twining, as he appears on the title page, didn’t seem to like animals much, as we will see, but he gave them credit for arriving in this world with the same spiritual accoutrements as humans. “It is reasonable to conclude…” he wrote, “that all forms of life have accompanying souls…and that animals would form fit subjects…since they could be killed at will and under any chosen conditions, while human beings could not.”

  Over the following four pages, H. LaV. offs thirty mice on his scale, using every condition the Polytechnic supply closet would support. He suffocated them in test tubes melted shut by Bunsen burners (no weight loss). He smothered them in flasks sealed with rubber stoppers and flasks sealed with parafinned corks (no loss, and no loss). He gassed them in open flasks with cyanide pellets. Here at last he witnessed a loss: one to two milligrams “at its last kick.” H. theorized that the poison had caused the mice to “perspire violently at death,” and that the lost milligrams were evaporated mouse sweat. I did a little reading on the subject of cyanide poisoning, in the form of a paper by Dr. John M. Friedberg, which helped prompt the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to deem cyanide executions cruel and unusual. Death by cyanide does appear to be moderately aerobic—panic, retching, seizures, violent head extension, grimaces—though excessive perspiration isn’t specifically mentioned as a symptom. Excessive salivation is, however. Perhaps some seizure-flung drool escaped the confines of the flask.

  A colleague suggested that the lost weight might have been air expelled from the dying rodent’s lungs. No slouch, H. decided to test for this, too, a process he describes, with his characteristic flair for insensitivity, like this: “A mouse was thrown into a tank of water.” A test tube was slipped over the head of the drowning mouse to catch the air it expelled as it died, and this was weighed and found to be negligible.

  H. quickly moved on to more pressing matters, such as the author of a book on Rosicrucian theory who had misstated some of H.’s conclusions and misspelled his name. “This is inexcusable,” he crabbed. If humans, like mice, could be killed at will, I know just who would have been found in a tank with a test tube over his head. And along with him, the animal rights advocates who chastised Twining for his cruelty. (An account of his work had run in a local newspaper.) Here is Twining in defensive overdrive:

  Nearly every person who reads these lines has suffered more from the tooth ache, a thousand times more, than any of these mice did in dying….

  Even though suffering does not take place, there is no reason why dumb animals should not have their share of suffering. Human beings during a lifetime are subjected to hours, days, and years of mental and physical anguish inflicted upon them through no fault of their own….

  The human family lives on the products of death…. We eat either animal or vegetable food and in either case life is destroyed…. To kill low forms of life is justas bad, if killing be bad at all, as the killing of the higher forms of life, and there is no need of becoming hysterical over it.

  The point to take away from H.’s work is that if you put a dying mouse in a sealed container—such that moisture, expelled breath, drool, et cetera, are trapped—its weight won’t change. So H. LaV.’s work with mice is in line with Duncan Macdougal
l’s dog findings, neither showing evidence of a departing soul.

  IN 1998, DONALD Gilbert Carpenter published a whole book about soul-weighing (Physically Weighing the Soul). It’s a long book but lightweight, as light as a soul, for it exists only in cyberspace, available by download at 1stBooks.com. According to Carpenter, the reason the dogs and the mice might have shown no weight loss at death is that their souls are so light they were below the scales’ detection thresholds. Macdougall said his dog-weighing scale was accurate to one-sixteenth of an ounce (1.8 grams), but a dog’s soul weighs less than 1.8 grams. How do we know this is the weight of a dog’s soul? Because Donald Gilbert Carpenter has calculated it. (I love this guy!) Using Macdougall’s findings for human beings—that the soul weighs about 20 grams—Carpenter calculated the ratio of soul-weight to body-weight-at-birth: 1 to 140. Applying this to a typical puppy birth weight, he deduced that the average dog soul weighs one gram—about half the 1.8-gram sensitivity of the scale. Same problem with Twining’s mouse souls—too light to register. (But not Jesus’ soul. The discarnate Jesus is calculated in Chapter 17 to weigh 364 grams—close to a pound!)