Halloween has just passed is common to link it to the Celtic holiday call Samhain which falls on the same day, However, Halloween as we know it is a very different kind of day. But since the relationship between the two is often discussed, a different Scottish supernatural connection is discussed here.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall

Dr. Duncan MacDougall, is not exactly a “Scottish Dr. Frankenstein” but he does have a connection with the supernatural – but maybe not nearly as scary as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Dr. Duncan MacDougal is a real person. He was born in Glasgow, in 1866 and moved to Haverhill Massachusetts in the United States when he was about twenty. He attended the Boston University School of Medicine and received his medical degree.

After graduating, he returned to Haverhill where he began his medical practice. He married Mary Storer, and they had a son, John in 1985. The following year his naturalization was finalized.

Dr. MacDougal volunteered time in The Cullis Consumptives’ Home in the nearby town of Roxbury. The building had originally been the home of a textile merchant and when the building was turned over to the Home a platform scale had been left behind.

MacDougal hit on the idea of showing that the “soul” might be physical enough to cause a drop in weight of a body as the soul left the body.

MacDougal placed a dying patient on a cot on the scale and recorded the weight. He noticed that at the moment of death there was a very small loss of weight somewhere between ¾ ounce up to 1½ ounces. His experiments were carried out over 5 years with the help of other doctors, although the Home was rather concerned about the entire project. The concern was based on the potential loss of donations which were made to maintain the hospital if it were to be proved that there was a flaw in the experiment. If MacDougal was correct, then there were scores of religious problems likely to arise when the “soul” suddenly was shown to be a physical manifestation with weight.

In the end, six patients had expired, but the data on two of them had to be discounted for technical reasons with the scale, so his results were based on four patients – only one of whom showed the loss of weight.

MacDougall tried the same experiment with 15 dogs. They showed, as MacDougall predicted, no loss of weight at death since dogs, do not have souls.

The New York Times on March 11. 1907 violated its rule not to publish scientific reports before they had been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal and published the results of MacDougall’s experiment. This did happen in May of 1907, when two journals, American Medicine and Journal of the American Society for Psychic Research simultaneously punished his work. The other physicians declined to have their names on the work.

The work was picked apart by the scientific community, although news media in the “Bible Belt” rallied to the defense of the work since it “scientifically proved” the existence of the soul.

The experiment became known as the 21 gram experiment (about .75 of an ounce) had a much stronger impact on the religious communities than the scientific one, which has largely denied the validity of the experiment.

The experiment has entered into the cultural consciousness and the idea that the soul weight 21 grams is still current. In 2003, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts starred in film called 21 Grams written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Gesù bambino

Performed by Luciano Pavarotti, Wandsworth School Boys Choir, The National Philharmonic Orchestra, Kurt Herbert Adler

The Italian Christmas carol was written in 1917 Pietro Alessandro Yon (August 8, 1886 – November 22, 1943) in Settimo Vittone, (Piedmont, Italy). Yon was an Italian composer and organist who moved to the U.S. in 1907.

Its chorus incoporates a part of the famous carol “O Come All Ye Faithful” (Adeste fidelis) which is often sung in the Latin version.

*In the sense of a “bundle of joy”

There is a more commonly done version which isn’t really a translation as much as it is a recasting of the sentiment. It usually is used when the singer opts not to do the song in Italian and it is often known as “The Christmas Rose”.

Although Christmas songs appear with wild abandon each year – Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Clause, Little Drummer Boy and so on, there have been virtually no “carols” that have been able to fight their way into the traditional Christmas repertoire, save this one.

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