When it comes to passing something of yourself on to future generations, having a portion of your integument fashioned into a book cover probably wouldn’t be high up on the list for most folks. But that was what a French physician, Ludovic Bouland, did to a female patient when he decided to use her skin to cover a copy of French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye’s book “Des Destinées de L’âme.” That book now resides at Harvard University, which recently decided to remove the human skin from the book cover and store it respectfully away, and that’s probably for the best.
The book, “Des Destinées de L’âme,” meaning “Destinies of the Soul,” was written by Arsène Houssaye, a French novelist and poet, in the early 1880s. The printed text was given to a physician, Ludovic Bouland, who ”bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased…
