Harvard University has said it will be removing the binding made of human skin from a 19th-century book held in its library because of the “ethically fraught nature” of how the unusual binding took place.
The book, called Des Destinées de l’Ame (or Destinies of the Soul), has been held at the university’s Houghton Library since the 1930s but drew international attention in 2014 when tests confirmed that it was bound in human skin.
On Wednesday, however, the university said that after “careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration” it would remove the skin binding and will work with authorities to “determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains”.
The book was written by Arsène Houssaye, a French novelist, in the mid-1880s as a meditation on the nature of having a soul, and life after death. The volume’s first owner, the French physician Ludovic Bouland, then bound the book with human skin. Harvard said that Bouland took the skin from a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked, without consent.
This troubling history, which Harvard called “ethically fraught”, led the university to decide to remove the skin binding.
“As you can imagine, this has been an unusual circumstance for us in the library and we have learned a great deal as we arrived at our decision,” said Tom Hyry, an archivist at Houghton Library, in a Q&A issued by Harvard announcing its decision to remove the book from its library.
Read more here from The Guardian.
