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Some time before around 1623 a dying man of aged 60, questioned on his deathbed about his faith in Christian, describing the soul as ‘a great bone in his body’, and, ‘after he was dead, if he had done well’ would be ‘put into a pleasant green meadow’. This kind of belief was probably more common than educated Christians during that time, yet they too, speculated as to the nature of the soul and its relationship with the human body.
What was the soul? How did it get into the body of a foetus? How did it leave the body of a dying person? And where was it located in the human body, in the time, long or short, between gestation and death?
John Donne and Sir Walter Raleigh portrayed metaphorically about the soul, speculating at length as to whether the soul of a newborn baby had come in a direct line from Adam or if it had been separately infused by God around 40 days after the conception. The main possibilities for the ‘location of the soul’ were the heart or the brain. Most people also concurred that the body and soul were joined by a fine, hot vapour of blood known as the ‘vital spirits’. These rose through the body, from the liver to the heart, and were processed into their most rarefied state by a complex of veins and arteries at the base of the brain, known as the 'rete mirable', or ‘wonderful net’. In locating the soul, most accepted that it was closely bound up with the breath and the blood, completely admitting that the earthly soul could be a quantity as well as an entity.
Between April 1901 and May 1902 one of the most famous metaphysical experiments of the 20th century was performed by a Massachusetts medical doctor, Duncan MacDougall, who attempted to weigh the soul. At a charitable home for dying consumptives in Dorchester, Massachusetts he placed patients on a beam scale when they were considered to be close to death. He believed that if the soul were actually real, it should have measurable weight. After testing six patients dying of tuberculosis, he concluded that dying results in the small but measurable loss of ¾ of an ounce – the weight of the soul.
MacDougall’s believed that, the soul should be found only in human beings and not in other animals. He therefore performed similar experiments with the dogs and found no loss in weight as the animals expired. This he regarded as confirmation of his belief that souls are found only in living human beings, and that when a human being dies, the soul departs the body. Later scientists wasted few words in stressing how crude the scales were and how many subtle chemical channels there are through which a corpse can naturally lose weight.
If these souls were really departing then, they in fact had different weights. MacDougall’s attitude was merely a more heartless scientific version of that shown by the educated peers of Donne or Milton and the peasant mourners of later centuries. The soul was something and, therefore, it must have both mass and weight. Perhaps, then, it could be photographed. Attempts to do so were often motivated by the hope of financial gain. In November 1949, the American copper prospector James Kidd disappeared in the superstition mountains of Arizona. Though no body was ever found, he was eventually declared dead. In 1964 his will was read, stating that the considerable fortune accrued by Kidd, who had no heirs, should go to ‘research or some scientific proof of a soul of the human body which leaves at death.
Some time before March 11th, 1967, with hearings underway in Arizona’s superior court, ‘the Psychical Research Foundation reported that it had infra-red photographs of the soul made with the aid of a medium in Mexico’. These, however, proved to be as fraudulent as those who claimed to be Kidd’s heirs. By September, the stoical Judge Robert Myers was still working his way through the 35th of 133 possible claims. On November 7th, 1967, he finally appointed the Neurological Sciences Foundation of Phoenix as trustee. But, following an appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, the initial decision was overturned and the $200,000 was granted to the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), which conducted research on the ‘Hypothesis of Post-Mortem Survival’ until funds ran out in May 1975. Although no photographs were ever produced, the ASPR did do some very interesting work on Out of Body Experiences.
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