Harvard University has finally withdrawn a book that was bound with the skin of an unidentified woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital, acknowledging “past failures in its management.”
The Ivy League school first learned of the legitimacy of claims that the book, Des Destinées de l’Ame, meaning Destinies of the Soul, was covered in real human skin in 2014, in the latest scandal the institution faced. .
The book contains a note from its former owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, who bound it, explaining that he performed the strange act because “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human cover.”
The author, Arsène Houssaye, a friend of Bouland, did not participate in the process. The book is described as a meditation on the soul and life after death.
“The evidence indicates that Bouland bound the book with leather, taken from a woman, that he had acquired as a medical student,” Tom Hyry, Harvard’s associate librarian for archives and special collections, said this week.
“A memo accompanying the book written by John Stetson, which has since been lost, told us that Bouland took this skin from the body of an unknown deceased patient at a French psychiatric hospital,” he added.
The infamous book binding. The human remains are now safely stored at Harvard
The author, Arsène Houssaye, was not involved in the union with human skin.
The notes that accompanied the book explaining why the binding was made.
When Bouland died in 1933, the book was presented as a gift to Harvard by John B. Stetson, an American diplomat who was the heir to the Stetson hat empire. Stetson graduated from the Ivy League school in 1906.
Stetson knew about the skin and told Harvard about it during the donation.
Since 1954, the book has been in open circulation at the school, meaning it can be accessed by any member of Houghton Library.
In a statement, Harvard admitted that students were commonly harassed and tasked with checking out the book, something the school calls an example of its “past failures in book management that further objectified and compromised The dignity of the human being”.
In that statement, the school apologized for this.
An associate librarian at Houghton Library, Anne-Marie Eze, said removing the book was “part of the University’s broader project to address human remains in its collections.”
A Harvard spokesperson, Kerry Conley, said The Harvard Crimson, that the school also regretted two 2014 blog posts that described the book in “joyfully dark terms.” In 2015, the book was only available by special order.
‘While the media seemed interested in the morbid nature of the object, there were several people who objected to the tone of the posts and the book. “We agreed with the criticism and amended our blog posts,” Conley said.
A 2022 audit by Harvard found that the school kept more than 20,000 human remains in archives, about 19 of those remains are descendants of African slaves and another 6,500 are Native American.
Defenders say former Harvard president Claudine Gay reached out years ago to withdraw the book.
Harvard’s Houghton Library, the premier repository of rare books and manuscripts
Soul Destinies are the only human remains associated with the library.
The mask is now stored in the library while the book is digitized for anyone who searches for it. The physical book will eventually be available to researchers without the skin.
“The central problem with the creation of the volume was a doctor who did not see a whole person in front of him and carried out a hateful act by removing a piece of skin from a deceased patient, almost certainly without consent, and using it in a book binder that many have run for more than a century,” Hyry said.
“We think it’s time to put the remains to rest.”
Harvard says it is working to identify the woman in question so it can lay her to rest.
Since 2014, rare book experts John Lancaster and Paul Needham have been investigating the case for removing Destinees of the Soul from circulation, according to the Crimson report.
During that time, the school contacted top school officials, including former president Claudine Gay.
A week ago, Lancaster, Needham and Needham’s wife, Rabbi Ruth M. Gais, published an advertisement in the Crimson, imploring the school to repatriate the woman’s remains to France.
An expert in medical history books, Simon Chaplin, told the bbc in 2014 that the use of human skin for binding was not unknown.
“In general, it appears to have been done in the 19th century by doctors who had access to human bodies to perform dissection,” Chaplin said.