© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine
EDITORIAL
Blinded by the light
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A recent American film—21 grams—made the assertion that at the precise moment of death each of us loses 21 grams of weight. My curiosity was aroused by this startling claim. Given that more than 2 million Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens at some stage in their lives, I assumed that this rather extraordinary statement was simply more American bunkum.
Believe it or not, such an experiment was actually carried out. In 1907, Duncan MacDougall MD of Haversham, Massachusetts performed a series of extraordinary experiments on dying patients. 1 He reported six cases where he was able to weigh the patients at the moment of their death. He did this by balancing the patient’s bed on a beam balance, and selected patients with tuberculosis and diabetic coma who had died from "exhaustion" with little or no muscular movement apart from breathing in their terminal stages of life.
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