Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (7 page)

As further evidence for the Organ of the Instinct of Propagation, Gall cites a young widow who admitted that
since childhood she had felt “strong desires that were impossible to resist” and during these moments the nape of her neck burned. Gall describes placing his hand on her young widowly nape during one of these burning-desire episodes and discovering “a very considerable rounded prominence,” possibly one of several going on in the room.

Item #19.216 of the Gall collection is the skull of Franz Joseph Gall. Gall disciple N. J. Ottin notes that “on the occiput, the tendency toward sex was very marked.”

From Gall’s day onward, the soul began to drift away from the provinces of anatomy and neurology and off into airier domains: religion, philosophy, parapsychology. The men of medicine were through with the soul—with one terrifically odd exception.

*
There’s a good chance you underestimate almost everything about the sea urchin. For instance, the
Encyclopædia Britannica
tells us some sea urchins use their little sucker-tipped feet to hold pieces of seaweed over their heads like parasols, for shade. Plus, they have teeth that can drill into rock and excavate entire living rooms for their owners. The teeth are hard to see, because sea urchins sit on their mouths; possibly they are self-conscious about their “complex dental apparatus called Aristotle’s lantern.” One type has spines that can be used as pencils, though not, disappointingly, by the urchin itself.

*
Zimmer’s book is about the dawn of neuroscience: the first men to open up heads and figure out how brains worked. Zimmer once edited a story of mine for
Discover
, a situation from which he’s probably still recuperating. The guy is smarter than anyone I know. If you were to open up his head, his brain would burst out like an airbag.

*
My disappointment was short-lived, for this was a wondrous book. Here were detailed rabbinical opinions upon “whether or not a cattle breeder whose animal caused damage by knocking something with its penis must make restitution” (undecided); upon the inadmissibility of cleansing the anus “with the snout of a dog”; upon “the misconduct in which a woman places into the vagina of another woman a piece of meat from a fallen animal.” Here were descriptions of “hairy heart” and treatments for chronic uterine bleeding (“take three measures of Persian onions, boil them in wine, make her drink it and say to her, ‘Cease your discharge!’ ”).

†
A rather barren place, from what I gather. Egyptians made frequent trips to the family plot to supply departed souls with food, clothing, and kitchen items. According to Clara Pinto-Correia, some tombs were even outfitted with toilet facilities for the ka (soul). That No. 2 carries over into the afterlife was apparently a common belief. Correia cites a reference to a funerary fragment expressing anxiety over the possibility that the ka, should its food cache run out, might resort to feeding on its excrement.

*
I was intrigued to learn that the French for “pus”—even among members of eighteenth-century aristocracy—is “
le pus
.”

*
I feel it would be wrong to introduce Le Petomane into a manuscript and then abandon him in the very same sentence. I had always thought that the act consisted of popular songs performed on his own wind instrument. But I learned from “The Straight Dope” columnist Cecil Adams that, in fact, Le Petomane, whose real name was Joseph Pujol, could produce only four notes without the aid of an ocarina. This is not to belittle his rectal talents. Pujol could smoke a cigarette down to its butt (or his butt, or both) and blow out candles, as well as expel a fountain of water several feet into the air.

*
In looking up “portable hydrogen gas generator” on Google, I came across a study called “Detection of Flatus Using a Portable Hydrogen Gas Analyzer,” apparently a novel use of the device. The author taped the machine’s sampling tube to twenty postoperative gastrointestinal patients’ buttocks in an effort to detect farts, a happy sign that their plumbing was back in action. Hydrogen is the main component of flatus; you and I are, in essence, hydrogen gas generators of a less portable variety.

*
The terms “idiot” and “lunatic” were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. “Imbecile” and “feeble-minded person” were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. (When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop.) That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.

I
T WAS A pretty place to die. The mansion on Blue Hill Avenue was the showpiece of the Dorchester, Massachusetts, estate known as Grove Hall. Four stories tall, with a porticoed porch and cliques of indolent shade trees, the mansion had been home to T. K. Jones, a wealthy merchant in the China trade. In 1864, it was bought by a physician-cum-faith-healer named Charles Cullis, who turned it into the Consumptives’ Home—a charitable operation for late-stage tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) patients. With the discovery of antibiotics sixty years off, prayer was as useful a treatment as any then on offer. TB patients were routinely packed off to sanitariums, ostensibly to partake of rest
“cures,” but mainly to keep them from spreading the disease.

Had you been visiting the Consumptives’ Home in April 1901, you might have been witness to a 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 an
ounce.” 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 experiment on five more patients. A paper summarizing his findings ran in the journal
American Medicine
in 1907. In the months that followed, dubious M.D s launched their criticisms in lengthy letters to the editor. Macdougall countered them all. One correspondent pointed out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the loss was perhaps urine and/or feces. Macdougall patiently replied that if this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon the scale. Someone else suggested that the dying patients’ final exhalation might have contributed to the drop in weight. To prove that it hadn’t, Macdougall gamely climbed onto the cot and exhaled “as forcibly as possible,” while Sproull watched the scale. No change was observed.

The most likely culprit was something called “insensible loss”: body weight that is continually being lost through evaporating perspiration and water vapor in one’s breath. Macdougall claimed to have accounted for this. His first patient, he wrote, lost water weight at the rate of an ounce per hour, far too slowly for insensible loss to explain the sudden three-quarter-ounce drop at death.

THE HISTORICAL AUTHORITY on insensible weight loss is a Paduan physiologist named Sanctorius. Known humdrumly as the “founding father of metabolic balance studies,” Sanctorius coined the term “insensible perspiration” in 1690,
in a diverting volume entitled
Medicina statica
.
*
To aid him in his research, Sanctorius devised an experimental scale of his own. He suspended a platform on a massive steelyard scale. The platform held a bench with a hole cut out of the center of it and a bucket underneath it, and in front of the platform stood a supper table: Out box and In box. Sanctorius sat himself down on the platform, enjoyed a meal, and then sat around on the scale for eight hours, availing himself of the bucket when needed. He then weighed, to use his exuberantly capitalized phrasings, “the Excrements of the Guts”—observing on an unrelated tangent that “the thick ones are lighter and
swim
.” Sanctorius found that a small portion of the food weight remained unaccounted for, i.e., wasn’t down there in the bucket. This he ascribed to evaporated sweat and breath vapor, which he collectively dubbed insensible perspiration.

Sanctorius calculated that an eight-pound intake of meat and drink will, over one day, yield five pounds of insensible perspiration—or an average of three ounces of sweat and breath vapor lost per hour: three times the rate Macdougall observed. At one point Sanctorius describes the digestion of “a supper of eight pounds.”
†
It soon became clear there was little overlap between the dripping trencherman of Sanctorius’s day and Macdougall’s dry little consumptives. I skipped ahead to Section VI, which was all about the effects of immoderate coitus on insensible perspiration. Sanctorius effected the
quaint habit of presenting his findings in the form of aphorisms. As in, “Aphorism XXXIX: Such a Motion of a Body as resembles that of a Dog in Coition, is more hurtful than a bare Emission of Semen; for the latter wearies only the internal Parts, but the other tires both the Bowels and the Nerves.” Or “Aphorism XL: To use Coition standing, after a Meal, is hurtful; because as it is upon a full Meal, it hinders the Offices of the Bowels.” Sanctorius preached that by obstructing insensible perspiration, immoderate sex led to everything from “Palpitations in the Eyebrows and Joynts” to a hardening of the tunicles of the eyes—and here we have what I surmise to be the original striking of the masturbation-makes-you-go-blind myth. Sanctorius preached a carnal moderation that seemed almost killjoy—all the more so for the book’s wanton promotion of oysters as sources “of the greatest possible nourishment.”

TO GET TO THE bottom of the insensible weight loss conundrum—is it an ounce per 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 a
tad 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 central
tenet 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 plentiful examples of Macdougall’s consistent toe-the-line geekdom. He was class president and class orator at BU. A 1907 article in the
Boston
Sunday
Post
flatly stated that Macdougall was a believer in neither spiritualism nor psychic phenomena. A
Haverhill Evening Gazette
piece described him as “hard-headed and practical.” Greg Laing, head of the History Room at the Haverhill Public Library, recalls visiting the Macdougall household with his parents as a boy, so I asked
him about the good doctor’s nutter potential. (Macdougall had died by then, but his widow and son were still living.) “God, no,” said Laing. “They were such grim, straitlaced people. Really and truly, they were not esoterically inclined.” I phoned Olive Macdougall, the widow of Macdougall’s only grandchild. Though her husband never knew his grandfather, Olive confirmed the family’s decidedly nonmystical bent. Her father-in-law, Duncan’s son, was a banker and lawyer.

The writer of Duncan Macdougall’s
Gazette
obituary tried to foist a little jollity on the man, but it was a thin effort: “He was cheerful in the sickroom and some of his sickroom phrases and words of encouragement remain on the tongues of his patients. A few of his sickroom phrases were: ‘Don’t you worry, my gal, everything will be all right’ and ‘Don’t you worry and you’ll get well in a bigger hurry.’”

Macdougall was neither madman nor visionary. What he was, I’m guessing, was a henpecked little man in need of attention. Greg Laing described Macdougall’s wife Mary as “a battleaxe of monumental proportion.” (Perhaps a chamomile tea drinker.) “I don’t think she had the slightest respect or interest in her husband’s project.” Macdougall got his strokes from his work. As far as I can tell, he made a habit of calling up the local papers to garner laurels where he could. “Dr. Macdougall Becomes Poet,” overstates the headline when some limp doggerel ran in
Life
. “Dr. Macdougall Wins Great Fame,” blusters another, after England’s navy agreed to have its Royal Marine Bands play Macdougall’s lurching composition “The British Tar’s Song.” (Macdougall’s nephew had a contact at the Admiralty, whom he deluged with 1,800 copies of the song.)