Harvard will remove binding made of human skin from 1800s book

internationaldesk:
Harvard University has said it will be removing the binding made of human skin from a 19th-century book held in its library because of the “ethically fraught nature” of how the unusual binding took place.
The book, called Des Destinées de l’Ame (or Destinies of the Soul), has been held at the university’s Houghton Library since the 1930s but drew international attention in 2014 when tests confirmed that it was bound in human skin.
The copy of the book at Harvard originally belonged to Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a French physician and bibliophile. Bouland, who died in 1933, made the binding of the book with the skin of a dead female patient from a hospital he worked at. The university notes that the skin was taken without consent. While the book had been in Harvard's collections since 1934, it wasn't until 80 years later that it was confirmed to have been bound with human remains.