Is There Loss of Weight After Death?

21 Grams

4/24/2004

Some history on the possibility (not required from God’s Perspective, of course!) that everyone may lose 21 Grams of weight at the exact moment of death. : ) And, of course, some would HATE this possibility for their own, obvious, ulterior motives.—mike

Thursday February 19, 2004

The origin of the 21g figure can be traced to Duncan MacDougall, a doctor working in Haverhill, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. MacDougall had a keen fascination with death. He thought that if humans had a soul, it may exist in the body as some kind of material. And that material may then weigh something.

1907, the year Einstein applied the laws of gravity to his special theory of relativity, MacDougall published his findings in American Medicine.

MacDougall describes how he set about converting a hospital bed into a rudimentary balance so he could measure a patient’s weight change as they died. The bed balance was sensitive, so to prevent his soon-to-be-dead patients from messing up his data, MacDougall hunted around for people who were dying of tuberculosis. As he noted: “It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case, the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted.” In other words, there was to be no flailing around that could upset the scales.

In all, MacDougall recruited six dying people for his study, four of whom had tuberculosis. In turn, each was tucked up in his modified bed and their weight monitored until some minutes after their death. Any bowel movements or urination at death were fine, at least so far as the experiment was concerned, as it all stayed on the bed.

MacDougall then repeated the study with 15 dogs. At the end of his study, MacDougall declared that humans lost up to three-fourths of an ounce upon death, or 21g, the metric equivalent. The dogs lost nothing.

In his own words,

The patient’s comfort was looked after in every way, although he was practically moribund when placed upon the bed. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat.

During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come.

At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death 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 an ounce.

This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat, because that had already been determined to go on, in his case, at the rate of one sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large, three-fourths of an ounce in a few seconds. The bowels did not move; if they had moved the weight would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture depending, of course, upon the fluidity of the feces. The bladder evacuated one or two drams of urine. This remained upon the bed and could only have influenced the weight by slow gradual evaporation and therefore in no way could account for the sudden loss.

There remained but one more channel of loss to explore, the expiration of all but the residual air in the lungs. Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed and I placed the beam at balance. Forcible inspiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect. In this case we certainly have an inexplicable loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce. Is it the soul substance? How other shall we explain it?

•  Make Your 21 Grams a Beautiful Place