From playful trinket to disgrace: embarrassed Harvard removes human skin cover from book

The library of the top American university Harvard will remove the human skin from the cover of a book in its collection, the organization wrote on Wednesday. The decision follows years of discussion about Harvard’s ethical obligations towards the large quantities of body parts in its collection.

The book, an edition of the French book Des Destinées de L’Ame (The Fate of the Soul) by writer Arsène Houssaye, came into the possession of Harvard in 1938, cover and all. According to tradition, the first owner, the French doctor Ludovic Bouland, took the skin of an unknown deceased woman and the cover of the book. In the book he placed a note with the text “a book about the human soul should also have a human cover.” No one knew if the book was actually bound in human skin, but the college myth surrounding the eccentric book was strong nonetheless.

For years the book was shown during library tours and – according to some traditions – used for initiation of new students. In short: the book was seen as a comic and somewhat lurid collector’s item, not as an embarrassment to the library. That changed in 2014 when Harvard had its own scientists investigate the myth. The book indeed turned out to be bound in human skin, after which a discussion started about the ethical responsibility that institutions such as Harvard have towards the human remains in their possession.

‘Sensational, morbid and comic tone’

The university has now apologized for the inappropriate “sensational, morbid and comic tone” with which the book was presented while it was part of the Harvard collection. The university is now looking for a way to respectfully lay the skin to rest.

In recent years, Harvard commissioned a large-scale study of the human remains in its collection, as part of a broad effort to unravel the university’s role in colonialism and America’s history of slavery. Researchers analyzed more than 20,000 objects in the collection, from whole skeletons to bone fragments.

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