The book, said to be a meditation on the soul and life after death, is believed to be the only one bound in human skin at Harvard.Ĭomparable tests undertaken on books at the university’s law and medical school libraries revealed books bound in sheepskin. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering”. “I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman,” he wrote. Located within “Des destinees de l’ame” is a note written by Dr Bouland, stating no ornament had been stamped on the cover to “preserve its elegance”. UK says China has to answer for Covid-19 virus Numerous 19th Century accounts exist of the bodies of executed criminals being donated to science, their skins later given to bookbinders. The practice of binding books in human skin – termed anthropodermic bibliopegy – has been reported since as early as the 16th Century. “The analytical data, taken together with the provenance of ‘Des destinees de l’ame’, make it very unlikely that the source could be other than human,” Bill Lane, the director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, told the Houghton Library Blog. ![]() Writer Arsene Houssaye is said to have given the book to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, in the mid-1880s.ĭr Bouland then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes. “Des destinees de l’ame” (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. Inserted in the volume is an autograph manuscript note written by Bouland: Ce livre est reli en peau humaine parchemine, c’est pour lui laisser tout son cachet qu’a dessein on n’y a point appliqu d’ornement. A book owned by Harvard University has been bound in human skin, scientists believe. Bouland bound the book with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke.
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