Harvard University has been rocked by a horrifying revelation, with the institution forced to apologise.
In particular, the famous American university announced that it will remove the binding of a 19th-century leather-bound book, which has been kept in its library since 1930, because it comes from… human skin – specifically from a dead patient.
The book, called Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul), has been kept in the university’s Houghton Library since the 1930s, but gained international attention in 2014 when scientific tests confirmed it is bound in human skin.
Yesterday, however, the university announced that after “careful study, stakeholder engagement and examination” it would remove the skin binding and work with authorities to “determine a respectful final disposition of these human remains.”
The tragic irony
The association of the premise of the book with the dimension it would take on probably looks like a tragic irony.
The book was written by Arsène Houssaye, a French novelist, in the mid-1880s as a meditation on what it’s like to have a soul and life after death. The first owner of the volume, the French doctor Ludovic Bouland, then bound the book in human skin.
Harvard reported that Bouland took the skin from a dead female patient at a hospital where he worked without his consent.
The chilling story, which Harvard called “morally troubling,” led the university to decide to remove the book’s binding.
“As you can imagine, this was an unusual situation for us at the library, and we learned a lot in coming to our decision,” Tom Heary, an archivist at Houghton Library, said after Harvard’s announcement that it would remove the book from his library.
“The main problem with the creation of the volume is that a doctor did not see a complete person before him and did the despicable act of removing a piece of skin from a dead patient, almost certainly without consent, and used it in a bookbinding that many people grasped for more since a century. We believe it is time for the remains to rest,” he added.
“We apologize for past management failures”
Confirmation of the book’s strange binding in 2014 was, at the time, treated more lightly by Harvard. The university had called the discovery “good news for fans of anthropomorphic bibliography, bibliophiles and cannibals alike.”
Harvard said it now regrets the “shocking, morbid and humorous tone” in which the discovery was announced.
“We apologize on behalf of the Harvard Library for past failures in the management of the book that turned it into an object and further compromised the dignity of the human being,” Hiry said.
It is noted that the book includes a note from Dr. Bouland’s binder, which states that it is “bound in parchment of human skin on which no ornament has been printed in order to preserve its elegance.”
“Looking closely one can easily distinguish the pores of the skin,” Bouland wrote. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human cover: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from a woman’s back.”