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

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 atad 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 centraltenet 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