Harvard University has decided to remove the leather cover of a French book in its library because it had been made from ‘unethically sourced’ human skin. But history shows ethics and ‘human leather’ have never been on the same page...
Sometime in the 1860s, a poor woman died unloved at a psychiatric hospital in the French city of Metz. Ludovic Bouland was a young medical student there, and he did what would be criminal and unthinkable today. He stole the skin off her back.
Young Bouland was also an amateur tanner and he turned the woman’s skin into leather with the extract of a plant called sumac. He was so proud of his handiwork that years later he wrote, “by looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin”.
Where did Bouland write this note? Inside a copy of Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) that the book’s author and his close friend Arsène Houssaye had gifted him. But before writing the note, he tenderly bound the book in that same old skin he had been saving for years. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he reasoned.
There was at least one other book that Bouland wrapped in a piece of the unfortunate woman’s skin, a compilation of essays on gynaecology, published in Amsterdam in 1663. “This curious little book on virginity and the female generative functions seemed to me to merit a binding congruent to the subject,” he wrote in it.
Embarrassment For Harvard
Dr Bouland’s ‘reasoned’ choice of a cover for Des Destinées de l’Ame recently caused much embarrassment to Harvard University, which had housed his copy of the human leather-covered book in its Houghton Library since 1934. Last week, Harvard announced it had removed the cover because of “the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.
That’s ironic because the nature of the cover material was never a secret. As Bouland declared in the book: “I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman”. And 10 years ago, a new technique called peptide mass fingerprinting had confirmed the leather’s human origin (tanning destroys DNA, so that technique was not used). Back then, the university had described it as “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike”.
To make amends, Harvard is now trying to find out who the mystery woman was and “consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains”.
Better Late Than Never
These memorial services for centuries-old victims of abuse are important because what’s a leather cover or lab skeleton to you is almost certainly somebody else’s kin or ancestor. As antiquarian bookseller Tim Bryars told The Guardian in 2014: “It is a sensitive issue, there are sometimes surviving descendants to consider…”
That’s what happened on April 13, 2011, the 190th anniversary of the public hanging of 18-year-old murder accused John Horwood. John’s father Thomas was a sailor whose last voyage had been to India in 1786. Young Horwood loved a girl named Eliza Balsum. Eliza went out with another boy on Jan 26, 1821. John got angry and flung a stone at her that hit her on the temple, and she died three weeks later, on Feb 15, resulting in John’s hanging on April 13.
But then, John was denied a decent burial. His body was used for dissection at Bristol Royal Infirmary, and his skin was tanned and turned into a cover for a ledger “containing the account of the murder he carried out, the trial and his execution,” a BBC article says. John’s skeleton stood in a lab cupboard for almost two centuries until it was found by Mary Halliwell, his brother’s great-great-great granddaughter who arranged the 2011 funeral.
Revolutionary Excess
Mostly, though, men and women whose skins were turned into leather have been denied all dignity. Revolutionary France was perhaps the first to make human leather on an ‘industrial scale’ while the guillotine worked overtime. In fact, a copy of the Republic’s 1794 Constitution, bound in human skin, was auctioned in Paris in 1872.
There’s a story about a tanner who made a proposal to the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ – equivalent to the home ministry – to let him use the castle of Meudon as a tannery for human skins. “In return for the concession, the members of the Committee were privileged to be among the first to wear top boots made of human skin,” an article in the July-Dec 1894 issue of ‘Current Literature’ magazine says.
Another book published in 1808 says, “as Paris supplied the (French) armies with shoes, it is possible that more than one defender of their country may have worn shoes made of the skin of his friends and relations”.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a leading light of the Revolution and notorious as ‘archangel of terror’, allegedly “caused a young and beautiful girl, who had refused his advances, to be arrested and sent to the scaffold. After the execution he obtained possession of the body, flayed it himself, and had the skin tanned and made into a waistcoat which he wore till the day of his death.”
Mrs Koch’s Grim Appetite
But nobody desecrated the human body quite like the Nazis, who turned human bones into fertiliser, fat into soap, and skin, of course, into leather.
Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, was among the worst offenders when it came to sourcing human leather. And she seemingly had a thing for tattooed skins. At her war crimes trial, the prosecution said: “A witness testified that accused No 15 (Ilse)... had a photo album, a briefcase and a pair of gloves made from tattooed human skin.”
In the summer of 1940, a man with “very excellent tattoos from the head to the toes, including a coloured cobra winding all the way up his left arm and an exceptionally cleanly tattooed sailboat with four masts on his chest” arrived at the camp. Ilse allegedly saw him working shirtless. “This inmate was called to the gate at evening formation. He was not seen again but about six months later a skin with the same sailboat was seen in the pathological department. In the summer of 1941 the same skin was seen on a photo album belonging to accused No 15.”
The pathological department was the hub of leather-making: “camp personnel worked on tattooed human skins… The skins were cleaned, dried and stretched on frames… They were shown in the course of inspections and exhibitions.”
Dr Kurt Sitte, a detenu at Buchenwald who started working in the department in 1942, also reported seeing “skins tanned in such a way that they could be used for lampshades, and similar things”. In other words, the skins had been processed to let light pass. Sitte said guards came to him and asked for tattooed skins to use as “a book cover, or for a knife sheath or purse – for all kinds of ‘souvenirs’.”
Dr Franz Blaha, a Czech national who survived the Dachau concentration camp, testified that “soft human skin was so prized for leather and bindings that victims would be shot in the back of the neck or knocked in the head so that the surface would be unmarred”.
These horrors seem unreal today, but ‘civilised’ Europe would have also considered itself incapable of such barbarity in the 1930s and 40s. Let’s hope human leather’s history won’t repeat itself.
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