FOR
SOME YEARS now full length feature films coming out of Hollywood
have been getting ever closer to the mainstream beliefs nurtured by
Spiritualists. The watershed was perhaps "Ghost". more recently came
"Sixth Sense" and similar offerings. The latest is released this month
and titled "21 Grams" and is based upon the work of pioneering American
medic Dr Duncan MacDougall who attempted to measure the weight of our
souls at the turn of the last century.
Despite
two Oscar and five Bafta nominations plus the fact its male lead, Sean
Penn, is a current box office attraction the film itself may not leave
a major mark. American critics were lukewarm on its release late last
year.
Described
as "an emphatic melodrama " it's plot revolves around a
recovering drug addict and widow who is drawn to an affair with a
melancholic maths teacher suffering from terminal heart disease. Add to
this a born again ex-convict terrorising his wife and two children with
evangelical fervour it can hardly be described as a 'feel good' movie.
Thus it comes as small surprise that immediately after its general
release in the UK home versions in DVD format will also be available.
But
what is important about this film is that it draws upon the now all but
forgotten experiments with terminal patients carried out in 1907 by Dr
MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and which first appeared in the
journal "American Medicine".
Dr
MacDougall set out to discover "if the psychic functions contuinue to
exist as a separate personality after the death of the brain and body".
He built a special bed in his sanatorium "arranged on a light framework
and balanced on highly sensitive scales " which could measure fractions
of an ounce.
He
won the co-operation of six of his terminal patients, one diabetic, two
with TB and one unspecified. He then set out to observe them in
their terminal stages of quitting this earth and made copious notes.
"Each patient's comfort was cared for in every way." One patient was
recorded as being 'practically moribund' when placed on to the special
bed. "He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to
evaporation of perspiration" .
"At
the end of three hours and 40 minutes he expired and suddenly
coincident with death the beam end of the bed dropped and recorded an
unexplained weight loss of three quarters of an ounce". Similar weight
losses varying from half an ounce to one ounce occured with at the
moment of passing with his other terminal patients. But Dr MacDougall
remained baffled by his measurements. He explored every other possible
reason for this phenomena from bladder and bowel evacuation to residual
air in lungs but could find no medical explanation. He then repeated
this experiment with fifteen dogs but without any similar
unexplained measurements.
When
his findings were published fellow medics scoffed and took him to
task. But MacDougall stood by his research although admitting that to
satisfy the medical community such experiments would need to be
repeated on a larger scale. By 1911 he turned his attention to X-rays
testing his theory that the human soul can be photographed.
Today
- almost 100 years on - few , if any, researchers have tried to repeat
Dr MacDougall's experiments but he did leave us a legacy that Hollywood
has seized upon for a movie.
Perhaps
their next foray into the two worlds of Spiritualism in search of
heroic inspiration will draw upon the suffering of materialisation
mediums.
(Article
reproduced with the author's consent)