Free Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife by Mary Roach

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 anounce.” 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