Mainstream media reported on these efforts, often uncritically. “Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks,” declared a New York Times headline on March 11, 1907. With four medical colleagues as witnesses, “reputable physician” Duncan Mac­­Dougall of Massachusetts had placed the body of a dying man on a specially designed bed, with built-in scales, next to an empty but otherwise identical bed. At the moment of the man’s death, the scales reportedly shifted, indicating a weight loss on his side of approximately one ounce. Five other cases showed losses between an ounce and half an ounce. In the case of one large, “phlegmatic” man, the weight loss was delayed a minute; MacDougall concluded that the deceased’s sluggish nature led his soul to depart without alacrity. (Wikipedia suggests this experiment is the source of the popular notion that the human soul weighs 21 grams.)