Harvard claims to have taken human skin out of a 19th-century book’s binding

Harvard University said that it has taken human skin out of the binding of a book on the afterlife from the 19th century that had been housed in its archives since the 1930s. After a review raised ethical issues with the book’s publication and background, the decision was made.

 

French writer and poet Arsène Houssaye wrote “Des Destinées de L’âme,” or “Destinies of the Soul,” in the early 1880s. According to a subsequent statement from Harvard, the printed material was delivered to a doctor named Ludovic Bouland, who “bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked.” The book has been kept in the Houghton Library at the university.

Bouland included the book with a handwritten letter. In an online question-and-answer session on Wednesday, associate university librarian Thomas Hyry said that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” The message also explained how to get the skin ready for binding.

The institution said that an investigation conducted in 2014 by scientists verified the binding’s composition of human skin.

Harvard stated in a statement that the library has identified many instances in which its stewardship procedures did not adhere to its ethical standards.

According to Harvard, “the book has been available to anyone who asked for it, regardless of their reason for wishing to consult it, until relatively recently.” “According to legend within the library, students working on page collections in Houghton’s stacks decades ago may have been subjected to hazing when they were asked to retrieve a book without being informed that it contained human remains.”

The university claimed in a statement that “the library published posts on the Houghton blog that utilized a sensationalistic, morbid, and humorous tone that fueled similar international media coverage” after the examination proved the book was bound by human skin.

During the Q&A, associate librarian Anne-Marie Eze of the Houghton Library said that the excised skin is now in “secure storage at Harvard Library.”

The library said that it would look into the book, Bouland, and the unidentified female patient further. Together with French authorities, it is figuring out a “final respectful disposition.”

The removal of the skin, according to Harvard, was the result of a library examination that followed the publication in 2022 of a Harvard University study on human remains in its museum collections.

According to Harvard’s announcement, “Due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections.”