At Harvard University, they decided to remove the binding from human skin from a library book.

“The time has come to interred these remains.”

Harvard will remove the human skin binding from a book from the 1800s. The university said the first owner of a French novelist’s book took skin from a deceased patient without permission.

Harvard University has said it will remove a human skin binding from a 19th-century book held in its library due to the “ethically dangerous nature” of how the unusual binding came about.

According to The Guardian, the book, called Fates of Love (or Fates of the Soul), had been in Houghton University’s library since the 1930s, but attracted international attention in 2014 when tests confirmed it was bound in human skin.

American Museum of Natural History in New York. Many medical and anthropological institutions in the United States face similar problems.

However, the university said Wednesday that after “careful review, stakeholder engagement and review,” it will remove the leather binding and work with authorities to “determine the final respectful treatment of these human remains.”

The book was written by French novelist Arsène Houssay in the mid-1880s as a meditation on the nature of having a soul and life after death, notes The Guardian. The volume’s first owner, French physician Louis Boulant, then bound the book with human skin. Harvard said Bulan took skin from a deceased patient at the hospital where he worked without consent.

This disturbing story, which Harvard called “ethically fraught,” led to the university’s decision to remove the skin patch.

“As you can imagine, this was an unusual circumstance for us at the library, and we learned a lot as we came to our decision,” said Tom Hairy, Houghton Library archivist, in a Q&A published by Harvard announcing its decision to withdraw a book from your library.

“The main problem in creating the volume was a doctor who did not see the whole person before him and committed the odious act of removing a fragment of skin from a deceased patient, almost certainly without consent, and using it in the binding of a book, which many have done for many years. more than a century. We believe it is time to interred these remains.”

In the past, Harvard students hired to handle page collections in the library were subjected to a hazing ritual where they were asked to take a book without being told that it was covered in human remains.

The confirmation of the book’s strange binding in 2014 was also taken more lightly by Harvard at the time. The university called the discovery “good news for anthropodermic bibliopedia fans, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike.” Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books with human skin, which was hugely popular in the 19th century but has been around since at least the 1500s.

Harvard said it now regrets the “sensationalist, morbid and humorous tone” in which the discovery was announced.

“We apologize on behalf of the Harvard Library for past failures in our stewardship of the book, which further objectified and compromised the dignity of the man at the center,” Khairy said.