Harvard Removes Human Skin From Book Cover (Eww!)

When it comes to passing something of yourself on to future generations, having a portion of your integument fashioned into a book cover probably wouldn't be high up on the list for most folks. But that was what a French physician, Ludovic Bouland, did to a female patient when he decided to use her skin to cover a copy of French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye's book “Des Destinées de L’âme.” That book now resides at Harvard University, which recently decided to remove the human skin from the book cover and store it respectfully away, and that's probably for the best.

The book, “Des Destinées de L’âme,” meaning “Destinies of the Soul,” was written by Arsène Houssaye, a French novelist and poet, in the early 1880s. The printed text was given to a physician, 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,” Harvard said in a recent statement. The book has been at the university’s Houghton Library.
Bouland included a handwritten note inside the book. It said “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” associate university librarian Thomas Hyry said in a published question-and-answer segment online Wednesday. The note also detailed the process behind preparing the skin for binding.
Scientific analysis done in 2014 confirmed the binding was made of human skin, the university said.

While this evokes a pretty visceral reaction in most folks (including me) that one may sum up as "eww," there does appear to be a twisted kind of logic to the whole thing: a book about the human soul and the afterlife having a binding of human skin, that is. And it's not like American academia hasn't engaged in some pretty odd stuff lately, although, we must admit, not quite to this level of weird.

Public School District Seeks Superintendent 'Unwaveringly' Opposed to Whiteness

The human skin evidently made the book a subject of curiosity, and it's safe to assume macabre humor among Harvard students, but here's the part of Harvard's statement I found interesting.

“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, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” Harvard’s statement said.

Here's a question: What if the patient had given consent? Would there still be an ethical issue? The issue of consent would seem to be the primary ethical concern here. This patient didn't give that consent. But if she had, that would seem to have an entirely different ethical slant. The visceral response - "eww" - would still be the same but with consent?

This could spin off into a whole different discussion about the limits to which a human can give consent, even to the disposition of their own bodies. We can give consent to donate organs and tissue post-mortem, and that's broadly accepted and generally viewed as perfectly ethical - so why not donate skin to bind a book?

This isn't the only book bound in human skin; in fact, there have been quite a few, and many still exist.

It's an interesting ethical discussion - for another time. For now, we see that Harvard did the right thing here. (And that's not something I often have the reason to say.) Hypotheticals aside, this skin was used without consent, and that is clearly unethical. Removing the skin - and the macabre attraction it presents - and finding some respectful way to dispose of it - is the correct decision.