1 month ago
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Harvard University finally removed a book that was bound with the skin of an unidentified woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital while acknowledging 'past failures in its stewardship.'
The Ivy League school first learned of the legitimacy of claims that the book, Des Destinées de l'Ame meaning Destines of the Soul, was covered in actual human skin in 2014 in just the latest scandal faced by the institution.
The book contains a note from its former owner Dr. Ludovic Bouland, who bound the book, in which he explains that he performed the bizarre act because 'a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.'
The author, Arsène Houssaye, a friend of Bouland's, was not involved in the process. The book is described as a meditation on the soul and life after death
'Evidence indicates that Bouland bound the book with skin, taken from a woman, which he had acquired as a medical student,' Tom Hyry, associate Harvard 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 woman patient from a French psychiatric hospital,' he added.
The infamous binding of the book. The human remains are now safely stored by Harvard
The author, Arsène Houssaye, had no part in the binding with human skin
The notes that accompanied the book explaining why the binding was carried out
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 donation.
Since 1954, the book has been in open circulation in the school, meaning any member of the Houghton Library, could access it.
In a statement Harvard admitted that students were commonly hazed and tasked with taking the book out something that the school calls an example of its 'past failures in its stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being.'
In that statement, the school apologized for this.
An associate librarian of the Houghton Library, Anne-Marie Eze, said that removing the book was 'part of the University's larger project of addressing human remains in its collections.'
A Harvard spokesperson, Kerry Conley, told The Harvard Crimson, that the school also regretted two blog posts from 2014 that described the book in 'gleefully dark terms.' In 2015, the book was only available by special request.
'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 to the book. We agreed with the criticism and amended our blog posts,' Conley said.
A 2022 audit performed by Harvard found that more than 20,000 human remains were held by the school in archives, around 19 of those remains are the descendants of African slaves, another 6,500 are Native Americans.
Advocates say that the contacted former Harvard president Claudine Gay about removing the book years ago
The Houghton Library in Harvard, the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts
Destines of the Soul is the only human remains associated with the library.
The skin is now being stored in the library while the book has been digitized for anyone seeking it. The physical book will be available to researchers eventually without the skin.
'The core problem with the volume's creation was a doctor who didn't see a whole person in front of him and carried out an odious act of removing a piece of skin from a deceased patient, almost certainly without consent, and used it in a book binding that has been handled by many for more than a century,' Hyry said.
'We believe it's time the remains be put to rest.'
Harvard says that its working to identify the woman in question in order to lay her to rest.
Since 2014, rare book experts John Lancaster and Paul Needham have been pursuing the case of having Destinees of the Soul removed from circulation, according to the Crimson report.
During that time, the school made contact with the top school officials including former president Claudine Gay.
A week ago, Lancaster, Needham and Needham's wife Rabbi Ruth M. Gais took out an ad in the Crimson, imploring the school repatriate the woman's remains to France.
An expert in books on medical history, Simon Chaplin, told the BBC in 2014 that the use of human skin in binding was not unheard of.
'It generally seems to have been done in the 19th Century by doctors who had access to human bodies for dissection,' Chaplin said.
