Does A Human Soul Have Weight?

This is _The New York Times_ 1907 headline that sensationalized a science experiment by a man named Duncan Macdougall. He had decided to run a macabre series of tests to see whether a human soul had weight. Six volunteers close to death agreed to spend their last breaths on a scale in his medical office, specially calibrated to two-tenths of an ounce. Macdougall watched as each person died, and declared that he had preliminary evidence that in fact, the human soul might have weight. Twenty-one grams is an amount that one of the patients lost upon death (it was actually 21.3 grams) — the other cases were less clear, with Macdougall stating that the scales hadn’t been properly calibrated in two instances. The study was published in the journal _American Medicine_. Although Macdougall had tried to hedge his conclusions by stating that more repetitions of his experiments were needed, the medical community criticized him for selectively reporting his measurements.