The job of therapy cats is to be with, play, and provide warmth at the end of life for patients. However, Oscar is not like other feline friends. As commented by the staff at Steele House: “Oscar is not a friendly cat, he often avoids, sometimes hisses at people when he wants to be alone. .” When he was 6 months old, Oscar began to appear strange powers. Like a messenger of bad news, Oscar has the ability to clearly determine who is about to be picked up by death. Usually about two days before a patient’s death, Oscar would leave his preferred locations and walk through the building’s hallways, visiting individual patients but never staying long. Dr. Dosa said: “ When someone is not ready to die, the cat will walk away. It won’t be in their room until the day they die. Sometimes it will be in the patient’s room up to 4 hours in advance. But usually it only appears about 2 hours before they take their last breath .” Oscar’s way of signaling was to jump into bed, lying next to a patient who was too weak to ward off it. Soon after, the patient takes his last breath. Up to now, more than 100 cases have been correctly predicted by Oscar, helping Oscar become a famous “cat of death” in the US media from 2007 to 2010. And there was only one death without Oscar’s presence. Not because the cat was unpredictable or inattentive, but because a relative of the patient asked to have the cat removed from the hospital bed. However, even when taken out, Oscar still had strange reactions. The cat scratched the front door, meowing. Apparently he wanted to stay in his room and wasn’t happy about being kicked out. Despite the possibility of death, Oscar was not hated at all. In contrast, staff at Steele House often closely observe the cat’s movements to contact the patient’s family soon. Many people were able to meet their loved ones at the last minute. Most of them are grateful to Oscar. Some even praised Oscar’s actions, saying that the cat was trying to get close to and bring warmth to the patients in the moment before saying goodbye to the world. At Steere House, there are currently 25 letters from the patient’s family to thank the cat. Some experts put forward scientific theories to explain this phenomenon. According to them, it is likely that Oscar’s action was simply to alert nurses and medical staff to the patient’s current condition. For example, with a dying person, the frequency of activities and movements in the room will be more (the reason is that medical staff often have to pay attention and follow up). Oscar may very often go to the bedside of a sick person, simply because he senses something unusual. In the animal kingdom, many species have the ability to sense and respond to signals that are difficult to detect around. In the case of Oscar, if the cat keeps wandering around the rooms, the possibility of contact with many people, including the dying patient is quite high and as such, this is just coincidental, accidental. . However, many people disagree with this interpretation. Previously, there was an interesting study that showed that dogs are animals that can detect cancer and some other diseases, although the success rate is not high. Although they do not have extrasensory abilities, instead, their super-sensitive nose helps detect subtle signs of disease that appear during the body’s response to disease. Like dogs, Oscar also has the same ability to smell. The chemicals secreted by the body when dying will trigger a response, but it is not obvious because countless other mixed odors in the hospital such as flowers, food, medicine, cleaning solutions, etc. have masked the “smell” the scent of death”. Until now, the story of the cat Oscar has not been clearly explained by science, so many people still believe that this cat really has the ability to “foretell” about death.

Poblenou is an iconic cemetery in Barcelona (Spain). It was built in the 18th century and especially impressed many visitors by the haunting “Kiss of Death” statue. Photo: Western 61. This intricate sculpture is placed for the tomb of Josep Llaudet Soler, a textile producer. At first glance, the statue looks quite horror with a skeleton holding the dying man. Deeply hidden in it, however, were of greater significance. Photo: Time Out. The statue is inspired by the famous Latin phrase “Memento mori” which means: “Remember the person who will die”. This quote is a symbolic reminder of the immortality of the soul and the afterlife. In this statue, death (represented by a skeleton) is holding the dying man and kissing him. Photo: My Modern Met. The epitaph is engraved with a poem by Jacinto Verdaguer – a famous Catalan poet. On it was written: “My immature heart is thus no longer beating / Blood in my veins has cooled / Strength is gone / Faith was praised when he swooped into the arms of Death. Amen”. Photo: BCN. Until now, many people still argue about who created this statue. Some say it is Jaume Barba – whose name is engraved on the statue. Another opinion says it is the work of Joan Fontbernat. “The statue is a perfect match. Death’s knuckles grabbed the soft flesh of the man reminiscent of life cycle,” commented My Modern Met. Photo: BCN. Poblenou Cemetery has many other beautiful statues carved with tombs. Now, the city has developed a mobile app that helps visitors look up information about Poblenou’s greatest tombs – including the “Kiss of the Dead” statue. Photo: ShBarcelona.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall and article on his soul weighing experiment. There have been several attempts to verify the existence of the soul, notably experiments by a famous doctor, to find out how much it weighs. Strange experiment Dr. Duncan MacDougall is a wealthy and respected physician in Haverhill (Massachusetts, USA). He has his own clinic and works at a medical facility called the Cullis Consumptives’ Home, which is for end-stage cases. In 1901, he came up with a strange idea, that is to determine whether the soul has or not, and if so, how much weight. MacDougall began experimenting on six patients who had lost hope of being cured. Four people with tuberculosis, one with diabetes and one with an unidentified disease, all of which did not last long in this world. He spent a lot of time recruiting only “patient who died of a debilitating illness, death with little or no muscle movement, because in that case the weight could be kept.” equal to more perfect and any loss that happens is ready to be noted ”. To make sure there were no mistakes, he meticulously measured a person’s weight before death, even noting slight changes in sweat and urine output. When the patients are dying, their entire beds are placed on an industrial-sized Fairbanks scale, with a sensitivity of 5.6 g. Along with four other doctors, MacDougall carefully recorded the weight changes of patients before and after their deaths. For the first patient, the weight loss observed immediately after apnea was 21g. A piece in the New York Times on March 11, 1907 recorded this moment: “When life ended, the weight of the needle suddenly dropped, as if something had just separated from the body. Immediately the usual post-mortem mass losses were calculated, but still 21 g was missing. According to MacDougall, this weight loss is not possible from the evaporation of moisture and sweat through the inhalation. The amount of air in his lungs was not the reason he brought air back to the patient’s body but the needle on the scale remained the same. Wastes or urine, if released, remain in bed and can only affect weight by slowly evaporating. MacDougall thinks this is an extremely promising development, and he does a similar procedure with the rest of the patient but the results are not the same. In the third patient there was a strange change that body mass did not change immediately after death but a minute later, body weight was reduced by 21g. The team only measured results from 4 patients, 2 of whom died before they could install the device. He then repeated his experiments with 15 dogs and found that they had no change in weight at the time of death. This was completely consistent with his belief that dogs had no soul. Later, a physics teacher at the Los Angeles Polytechnic School, USA also tried to conduct a similar experiment on mice in 1917. The results were consistent with the experiment of Dr. MacDougall, there was no deviation of weight when the rats died. How real? The scale used to weigh the soul. MacDougall’s research has caused a stir through articles in The New York Times, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and American Medicine. Many see this as evidence of the existence of the human soul, but others disagree. The limitation of the experimental subject has been criticized, while his methods are considered unscientific. For the general scientific community, the experiment has many shortcomings and has no real value. Some scientists point out that at the time of death, the lungs stop cooling the blood, causing the body temperature to rise slightly, the skin sweating – 21g in Dr. MacDougall’s experiment. At the same time, dogs do not have sweat glands, so they do not lose weight in this way after death. Despite these harsh criticisms, MacDougall defended his position, even conducting an experiment to photograph the human soul in 1911, but to no avail. After that, he almost fell into darkness, giving up experiments that proved humans have a soul, finally dying in 1920. There were also a few people who performed similar experiments over the years on animals, but MacDougal’s human experiments have never been tried or replicated since then. Does your research have any meaning? Regardless of the answer, the existence of the soul is not scientifically proven, and we will certainly never stop searching to answer one of the most important mysteries of existence. our own. Either way, the work of MacDougall still makes an interesting impression, not because of what he found (or failed to find) but because of what he “suggested” from his experiment. For many people, MacDougall’s ideas deserve to be studied and seriously discussed.