Harvard Library removes human skin from binding of French book

After decades of controversy, the Harvard Library has removed the human skin binding one of the most notorious books in its collection, “Des destinées de l’âme.”

“Harvard Library acknowledges past failures in its stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding,” the university library said in a statement Wednesday night. “We apologize to those adversely affected by these actions.”

“Des destinées de l’âme,” or “Destinies of the Soul,” has been in the Harvard collection since 1934 and was confirmed to be bound in human skin belonging to an unknown woman by forensic testing in 2014, Harvard stated.

The French book, written by Arsène Houssaye and published in 1879, is a study on the soul and life after death, Harvard Library states on a page dedicated to the book. The author gifted the book to a friend and book collector Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a physician who took skin off of a female body at a French psychiatric hospital where he studied as a medical student and used it to bind the copy.

In a handwritten note, Harvard Library said, the doctor describes how he bound the book and writes “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.”

The book first found its way to Harvard’s libraries in 1934 as a deposit from the American diplomat, businessman and Harvard alumnus John B. Stetson, Jr., according to Harvard. It was stored at Harvard’s flagship Widener Library and then moved a decade later to the Houghton Library, where the university stores rare books. Stetson’s widow, Ruby Stetson, permanently donated the book to the Houghton Library in 1954, where it has remained ever since.

In the statement, the university library said the decision to remove the skin was prompted by recommendations issued in the 2022 Report of the Harvard University Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections, a look into the tens of thousands of human remains displayed at the university and the many fraught ways they were acquired.

After “careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration,” the library and Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee stated they concluded the skin does not belong in the library collection “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history.”

The book has long garnered morbid and disturbing attention at the library. The Harvard Library noted it has in many ways failed to meet “ethical standards” in its stewardship of the book and lent it out to anyone regardless of their stated reasons until “relatively recently.”

While in the university’s care, the statement notes, library lore suggests the book has been used by students to haze other students who did not know it contained human remains.

In 2014, Harvard Library also published blog posts following the forensic testing — using peptide mass fingerprinting — of the book that used “sensationalistic, morbid, and humorous tone that fueled similar international media coverage,” the statement said.

Harvard Library said they are in the process of looking into where the remains belong and consulting with authorities at the university and in France “to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains,” but expects the process to take months at least.

The physical, disbound book is currently unavailable at the library, but the text can be studied online through the library’s search tool, HOLLIS.