The band sat around a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul, Des Destinées de l’âme by Arsène Houssaiye, which had been in the American library for almost ninety years. Harvard has been bothered by the book for years. In 2014, the library made the news because it announced that it would have the book binding scientifically examined to determine whether it was actually made of human skin. That led according to The New York Times to cheerful and scornful reports in the media.
The slavery and colony discussions later led to a broad investigation at Harvard in which all museum collections and university libraries were examined.
A report in 2022 found that Harvard’s collections held 20,000 human remains, ranging from complete skeletons, to strands of hair, teeth, ash, and bone fragments. The remains came from, among others, Native Americans and people of African origin – possibly enslaved people. And then there was that French book about the human soul.
‘Human jacket’
The book was donated to Harvard in 1934 by ex-diplomat John B. Stetson, scion of the wealthy hat family. According to information from Stetson, the book was bound in human skin by its first owner, the French doctor Ludovic Bouland, who left a note about it: “A book about the human soul deserves a human jacket.” According to Stetson, Bouland had used the skin of an unknown woman who had died in a French psychiatric hospital for the book cover.
In the decades after 1934, the book was regularly exhibited, in some cases Harvard had adopted an inappropriately “sensationalist, morbid and humorous tone,” the university said in its apology. On Wednesday, Harvard announced that it had permanently removed the controversial book binding. A decision has yet to be made about what will happen to the band. One proposal is to give the skin binding a proper burial in France, where the book comes from.
The removal of the tape followed a call from book expert Paul Needham, who also urged “a decent burial” of the human remains. According to Needham, the book has been “regularly used in a crude manner as an attention grabber and sensationalized into an exhibition object”, which he says is at odds with “any respectful treatment of a human being”.
Books bound in human skin were mainly found in the nineteenth century. American scientific researchers have identified fifty such books. Most were said to have been made by doctors, who then kept the works in their own book collections.
