(dramatic music) - How much do we really know
about the books we love? Any bibliophile will tell you, a book, especially a rare old book
is more than it's words. It's an encounter with history. What lives made this
dear old friend possible? No, really, what lives,
what literal human lives? ♪ Take a look ♪ ♪ It's in a book ♪ But don't take my word for it. Hello from my parent's house, dad, darling, you had one instruction. You were not to be banging around while your daughter was filming. - [Dad] I didn't make that much noise. - Ah, that's not what the camera says. Everyone say hi to my dad. This is the poet, Phyllis Wheatley. Phillis was born in Africa in
1753 and was sold into slavery when she was seven and brought to America. While enslaved to the
Wheatley family in Boston, she learned to read and write, publishing Poems On Various Subjects, Religious And Moral, at age 20, Phyllis was quite a good writer, a prodigy of sorts. Voltaire and George Washington were fans. I'd like to think she'd
be extremely popular on Gen Z Poetry Instagram today. But in 1772, she was put before a panel
of esteemed white men poetry experts, and
forced to prove she had in fact, actually written
her own book of poems. The writing was far too elegant
for an enslaved black woman to have written, they argued. Thankfully the panel was
convinced by Wheatley's abilities. And for a brief time, her work was celebrated
in literary circles. Wheatley was destined
eventually to be recognized as the first African-American
woman to publish a book of poetry, such an influential one at that, but perhaps no one was quite
as anxious to see that happen as German born immigrant
and Phyllis Wheatley super fan, 150 years later. George Hartman was a great
admirer of Wheatley's work and couldn't bear to see her forgotten. Said Hartman, "The literary
work of her life is small, far too small," an outspoken liberal and a
book collector with an affinity for African-American works, he had several copies of
Phyllis's book printed on fancy Japanese vellum
with ornate embellishment. Then he had them bound in
human skin, multiple copies. They still exist today. One at the University of Cincinnati and one at the Public
Library of Cincinnati in Hamilton County. Hartman's goal with the
whole skin thing was to increase the collectability of Wheatley's work and honor her talent, which I guess is one way to
support your favorite creator. I don't know when you're
picturing this taking place, but it's 1934. Quick question, George. We love the support and energy, living for what you've
done here, obsessed, but whose skin is that on the books? Who exactly is it that's
being flayed for book covers? A book bound with human skin
is known in scholarly circles as anthropodermic bibliopegy. If your mind goes
directly to the sinister, the Necronomicon, Nazis
making human lampshades, the victims of Ed Gein, you are not alone. Culture would have us think
that someone binding a book in human skin has only the
grimmest of intentions, pure evil and sorcery and nightmare fuel. - I am he who makers
call the glorious goal of Satan's unborn soul. (dramatic music) - Let's begin with HP Lovecraft, who's now gonna get mentioned
in every video, I guess. I used to want to name
my future inevitable Pomeranian HP Fluffcraft. And then there was the reckoning
about what a racist he was. And though I firmly
believe in nuanced teaching of the controversy. You don't want to be doing
that in a dog park every day. It's like ultimately HP's
racism was an Eldritch subconscious horror of The Other, stemming from his own deep
failures to obtain work while living in Brooklyn. And that, excuse me, Fluffcraft. Fluffcraft, did you make a poopy? Okay, mommy's coming, sorry. Lovecraft first introduced
the Necronomicon, the now famous occult
grimoire or magical textbook in his 1929 short story, The Hound, then his
history of the Necronomicon was published posthumously in 1938. It tells the lineage
of this book written by an Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in
Yemen, circa 700 BCE, a text so horrifying and powerful it was banned by the Pope. - [Male] Don't read it. - The fictional Alhazred
was a worshiper of Cthulhu and summoner of dark deities who was supposedly seized by madness and killed by invisible
demons in broad daylight. His Necronomicon was translated
from Arabic into Greek, Latin, and English, with
copies finding their way into the British museum where it had to be kept under lock and key, the Bibliotech National in Paris, and university libraries, including America's very
own Harvard University. Lovecraft described the
book as rigidly suppressed because reading it leads
to terrible consequences, but despite the Necronomicon
dark reputation, Lovecraft never said
anything about his creation being bound in human skin. That was for the fans and
other writers to fabulate. like Necronomicon fanfic, the Necronomicon being
a skin book connection was definitively forged
by folks like Stephen King and writer and director Sam Raimi. Raimi's Evil Dead movies are
probably most responsible for planting the human skin book in our collective
contemporary consciousness. - [Male] Necronomicon X
mortis, roughly translated, book of the dead. - In the movies, the Necronomicon X Mortis is
a book bound in human skin that will summon demons and
serve as a gateway to hell. The movies feature the
character of Ash Williams, played by Bruce Campbell, battling the book and the
ghoulish havoc that ensues when incantations are
recited from the text. - (speaking in foreign language) - Cabins in the woods, possession. - [Head] I stole your soul. - Medieval time travel. - Damn. - The chainsaw buddy. (man screaming) So much can go wrong. When a book is bound in human skin. The Necronomicon is visually
portrayed here as this gnarly stitched human face flesh thing
that best belongs on a dark alter, slightly less sinister, but I would argue equally influential, the Spell Book from Hocus-Pocus. - Looking for this? (witch cackling) But real human skin books? If we're talking real human skin books, well between you and me, they look, they look like normal books, just 100% normal books. - Shut up. - Although their ordinariness
may mean they're hiding in plain sight on your
bookshelf right now. No, they're not. Shall we see some? I headed to the Historical
Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, also known as the Mutter Museum. It's home to the world's
largest collection of confirmed human skin books, which is five. - I'm Heidi, Director of the
Historical Medical Library. - [Caitlin] When the books
are shown to the public, what's the reaction? Do they expect them to look more sinister? - Well, each person's reaction is unique, but frequently we hear, oh, I thought they'd be fully
bound in human skin. Not just partially bound, which is also known as
quarter bound or wow. I'd never know this was human skin, unless I look closely and
started to see the pores. And then as they look closely, they see how the pattern
matches their own skin. Often looking at the back
of their hand for comparison and suddenly it becomes really immediate, oh, this is a human, this is part of someone's
experience of being human. - [Caitlin] Can I touch one? - Yes, it's okay to touch
them, but very important. Have you washed your hands. - Surprisingly best practices
say that you shouldn't wear gloves when touching these books. The biggest surprise is how
much it looks like the flesh on my own thigh. I think you're now starting
to get the large gap of pop culture expectation versus
reality on these books. Let me share with you what I think is the best
example of this separation. The Huntington Library in Los Angeles has two alleged human skin items. One is a little dull, to be honest, it's a skin book from
1937 and it's called, Anatomy Epitomized and Illustrated. The other has a hideous pedigree, a parchment note from 1779 with
an inscription written on a page made of human skin. It says, This is the
skin of a white man taken by an Injun, scalped and skinned alive, belly cut out, tied to a bed of coals, and roasted to death. The Injun from Ulysses
use pale skin for money, Luke Swotland of Wyoming,
September 13th, 1779. Can you guess which one is
really made from human skin? When these two items were tested, they found that Anatomy
Epitomized and Illustrated was in fact bound in human skin. Whereas the Swotland note
was fake, it's cow hide. In that note on cow hide, just the idea of human skin
was weaponized and used to reinforce fears and biases, native Americans stealing white
skin and using it as money. This same weaponization and
wild rumors come up again with alleged books and items
from the French Revolution. With so many corpses
piling up from the jaws of the guillotine, stories spread that there were multitudes, whole libraries of
books being bound in all this human skin for the
pleasure of Republican generals and the new aristocracy. Chateau De Meudom between Paris and Versailles was long rumored to be the executed human skin, tanning factory of the revolution. And it wasn't just books,
rumor was clothing items like culottes were being tanned
and fashioned out of the same bodies. I heard you like the skin on your legs. So I made you pants of skin for your skin. But much like the outrageous
claims of the Swotland note, scientists have yet to
test a book from the era of the French Revolution that actually turns out to
have been bound in human skin. Twice now I've mentioned
these alleged skin books were tested, whose job is that? Oh, we know her. Of course we do. - My name is Megan Rosenblum, author of Dark Archives and member of, The Anthropodermic Book Project. Our aim is to identify and
test as many alleged human skin books as possible. - [Caitlin] How many
books have you tested? - We've tested 31 so far. Although we believe
there to be at least 50 in public institutions and more
owned by private collectors. - [Caitlin] How do you go
about testing an alleged human skin book? - [Megan] Sometimes we send a
kit to institutions to collect their samples for testing,
but sometimes I go collect it myself. Usually it's a special collections
room or conservation lab at a library or museum. They have the book in question
waiting for you and various staff watching you closely. I take out my scalpel or some
sharp tweezers and hold my breath and try to extract the
smallest portion possible from the book's leather. If the flake is large enough
to see with the human eyes, it's large enough to be
tested, I am by all accounts, a klutz, so this part makes me nervous. - [Caitlin] Wait, if you're such a klutz, why would this be your job? - Well, we don't have a
lot of people lining up to test human skin books. - [Caitlin] That's fair, continue. - [Megan] I deposit the tiny flakes of leather into plastic tubes, label them and send them to the chemist on my team for testing. - [Caitlin] Is this DNA testing
that your team is doing? - Age and the process of tanning
leather actually destroys much of the human DNA. The age of these objects
doesn't help much either. So we use a process called
peptide mass fingerprinting, different animals have
different protein markers. So we can tell if a book
is cow, pig, or human. - [Caitlin] What
percentage of the books you test end up being real? - Little more than half, about 60%. - [Caitlin] Okay, if it's
not French revolutionaries, who is making these real human
skin books that still exist? - Doctors. - Doctors, yikes. (dramatic music) - How about a free examination? - In the 19th century
when most of these books, the real ones, were being made, medical education was being
codified with new requirements for students to study and
dissect human cadavers. Having real cadavers on the
dissection table led to massive advances in our understanding
of the human body. But it also meant that the
dead were seen as a product, a learning tool, less than human. At the same time, books were viewed as real
status items to be collected and admired, especially by doctors. So doctors loved books and
doctors have access to corpses. Often poor, destitute, sometimes criminal corpses
with no family or money, a match made in heaven,
a match made somewhere. Megan tells us that it wasn't
morbid collectors or weirdos who spearheaded anthropodermic bibliopegy. It was mostly physicians
who were the customers and the practitioners. - [Doctor] Hello Mr. Pancreas. - So it's not criminals and weirdos and dark magicians making these books. But do we find doctors
even more threatening? Like, no, it hasn't
been the Zodiac killer, haunting the streets and
causing murder and mayhem. It's been Peppa pig. - Am I gonna collab with Peppa Pig, no? - That's scarier, right? A doctor is someone who
supposed to be the good guy, supporting us, healing us. But before we get too horrified, is binding books in human
skin even a bad thing? Let's head to the bowels
of a 19th century hospital and examine further. The year was 1868. And that's not surprising because
what you're about to hear, the most 19th century story ever. Not that I have to explain myself, but I'm not going to explain
what this costume is. You're just gonna have to wait and see. A 28 year old widow named
Mary Lynch was admitted to Philadelphia General Hospital, formerly Philadelphia Omes House. Built in 1731, it's been
called a bettering house or house of correction. But when it moved to Blockley Township, it became known to locals as Old Blockley, which really sounds like some
dank, grimy, London prison, best spoken with a Cockney
accent, which is spot on. Old Blockley wasn't that far
off from a prison, governor. That's my Dick Van Dyke Cockney. - The Constable, responstable. Now how does that sound? - Which is to say not Cockney. Old Blockley was a one-stop shop, Omes house, charity school, hospital, insane asylum and general
catch-all landing spot for the city's poor,
sick, and mentally I'll. Old Lockley was the perfect example of a mid to late 19th century move to stuff all of society's undesirables
into one establishment, not in the name of punishment, but in the name of
humanity, work, and reform, it was not a prison, but it was inspired by and
partially designed by one of the men who designed the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary. Old Blockley, like many
prisons of the time, was built to be a Haven, but
rapidly descended into hell. It was overcrowded, filthy, and
lacking the very humanity it was founded to uplift. Around the time Mary Lynch
would have been at Old Blockley, it was billed as one of the
great municipal hospitals of the world. But a doctor who actually
worked there described it like this. The management of the insane department at the time of my service was
devoid of medical knowledge and humanity as was possible. I have still vividly in my memory, pictures of raving maniacs and
straight jackets strapped to their bedsteads or the
doomed lunatic was bound to a massive chair, his head supporting a
capacious box of ice, which melting, poured it's
chilling contents down his person for hours together. As I mentioned before, in
this part of the 19th century, American medicine was making
great strides forward, and Old Blockley became
a teaching hospital of great reputation, largely due to the open access
doctors and the public had to all manner of maladies. Up until 1860, several
years before Mary's arrival, the public could pay eight dollars to see demonstrations
on the sick and poor. It was visited for the most
part by sightseers attracted by the same motives as one
visits an exhibition of animals, the hallucinations and
eccentricities of these poor God smitten creatures were the
subject of thoughtless sport. It was a burning shame on the good name of this Christian community. Patients feared becoming
clinical material, being poked, prodded, and tested upon in the name
of learning and prestige. Ultimately Old Blockley
and similar institutions on the East coast were where the
poor, sick, and friendless could be swept away and forgotten if they became ill or jobless. So when Mary Lynch ended
up at Old Blockley, it was a last resort. Suffering from tuberculosis, Mary was admitted on
Wednesday, July 15th, 1868. She was there at Old
Blockley for six months, including a particularly
hot punishing summer. Mary did have some family
that came to visit regularly, attempting to comfort
her with gifts of food that included ham and bologna sandwiches. Unfortunately, nobody noticed
that the meats had little white specks on them indicative
of a parasitic roundworm. So adding to her already dire situation, Mary contracted trichinosis
on top of tuberculosis, adding another wasting
disease that causes diarrhea, vomiting, fever, and abdominal pain. Mary Lynch succumbed to her
diseases on January 16th, 1869, weighing only 60 pounds
at the time of her death. in an unmarked Pauper's
grave behind the hospital, but a 23 year old doctor,
John Stockton Hough, had a particular interest in trichinosis and autopsied her body. He found approximately eight million cysts attributed to trichinosis. Because of this autopsy, Mary was the first ever
confirmed case of trichinosis at the hospital. That's the kind of medical
advancement and knowledge that autopsies provide. Arguably less necessary by our modern standards was Dr. Hough
removing strips of skin from Mary's thighs during that autopsy and preserving them in
urine, in a chamber pot, in his basement. After the urine had
performed its preservative magic on Mary's skin, Hough gave the strips to a
Tanner to properly and fully leatherize, fun fact
in leather preparation, which is essentially what this was, just using human flesh
instead of pig or calfskin, urine has a long history of
being used in the process. When Hough put Mary's skin in urine, the high pH not only broke
down organic material, but also softened the skin. Creating the light thin skins for bookbinding was a messy business in general. A common initial step was steeping the skins in dog excrement
or pigeon droppings, the enzymes would remove grease, blood, and rotting matter from the skin. The excrement also made
the leather more flexible. Since steeping the flesh in dog excrement was called puring in Victorian London, pure finders were people
who gathered dog droppings in a bucket to then
sell them to tanneries. Yeah, so that's my costume. I present now an English
pure finder's song. I don't know the melody, so
I'm just gonna go for it. ♪ I am an old pure finder ♪ ♪ When folks say, how do you do ♪ ♪ Says I, well I do do do ♪ ♪ And do do well, don't you ♪ ♪ I do do do so well ♪ ♪ When the do, do I do sell ♪ ♪ But could do, do, do better ♪ ♪ If the do do didn't smell ♪ - Now how does that sound? - It's very important for
me to be taken seriously as an intellectual. So I hope you didn't laugh at that. Fast forward over a decade later. Dr. Hough has developed a real interest in women's health and texts about women's reproductive health. And so he used Mary's skin
out of the old chamber pot to bind three of his favorite medical texts. Remember those books we met
at the Historical Medical Library in Philadelphia, three of them are bound in Mary Lynch. Speculations On The Mode and Appearances of Impregnation In the Human Female, by Robert Cooper. (speaking in foreign language) By Louis Barles. (speaking in foreign language) By Louis Bourgeois. Which one of these would
you say is your favorite? - I would probably have to say the Cooper. - That makes sense, because this is the one
that also has this wild note inside the cover, which reads, The leather
with which this book is bound was tanned from the skin
of the thigh of Mary L. Tanned in a pot de chamber by J.S.H. at the Philadelphia
Hospital, January, 1869, book bound in Trenton, New Jersey, March, 1884, Mary L was
Irish, widow, age 28 years. Died January 16th, 1869. John Stockton Hough, April 2nd, 1884. - As a librarian, I love
a reason to research. And this gives you so much
information to start with. It gives you a name. It gives you a place. It gives you a date and
it's so much to work from. And again, that's how we got so much genealogical research done. - [Caitlin] And it was because
of that reference to Mary L. that the library was
able to do this research. - Yes, the former college librarian, Beth Lander went to the
Philadelphia city archives and researched for a Mary L. And it turns out that with that date, which was just one day off, she was able to find her
and just using that one date and Mary L. And again, this tells
you who this person is. It's not just, ooh, a
book bound in human skin. This is a person. And that's how we refer to
these books colloquially in the library. We don't just say, hey, we're gonna bring out the books. We say, oh, we'll use the Mary's. We'll use the John. We'll use the leides soldier. And we try to amongst ourselves, give them a sense of personhood. If that's a word and just
acknowledge that these are people and treat them as such. - It's impressive how the librarians at the Historical Medical
Library care for these books, but can possessing human skin books. Even if you treat them with
mindfulness and respect, ever be ethical, some
people argue it can't. In 2014, the Houghton
Library at Harvard University announced via their blog
that peptide mass fingerprint testing revealed that a
book in their possession, Des Destinees De L Ame, by French writer, Armand Houssaye, was in fact bound in real human skin. Their choice of words for the
announcement was good news for fans of Anthropodermic bibliopegy, biblio maniacs and cannibals alike. Oh, wow, someone needs a
new social media manager. Cancel the library at Harvard, handclap emoji, handclap emoji. Listen, I wouldn't have
gone with the cannibal joke, but who am I to judge using
a little humor in explaining a difficult topic? Well, I do do do. I also understand the library's enthusiasm for this discovery, the scientific confirmation
of something long suspected since the book arrived in
their care in the 1930s, but there was someone who
was not amused or pleased. That someone was rare book librarian at Princeton University, Paul Needham, who found the wording of
the announcement shocking in its crudity. However, it isn't just the
flippant wording Needham objected to, it's his argument that the human skin covering the book is the result of quote, post mortem rape, that escalated extremely quickly. In the case of the Harvard skin book. The story is that the author
wrote the book in the throws of grief, after the death of his wife, he presented a copy of the
book to a friend of his, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, who in turn had the book
bound with some back skin of a nameless French woman. Skin that he had just been
holding onto for a rainy day, as one does. Bouland's reasoning for doing this was that a book that so
perfectly captures the human soul should also be wearing human skin. Paul Needham argues in his,
A binding of human skin, in the Houghton library, a recommendation that Dr.
Bouland excoriated the body of an indigent female mental patient. Needham believes the Dr. Bouland was absolutely intentional
when selecting a woman's skin in the binding
of the book and said, I do consider that an attack
on a female dead body as the skin of a male would not have
fulfilled his psychosexual needs in the same way. Needham considers keeping the
skin book at Harvard akin to exhibiting the remains
of Saartjie' Baartman, a 19th century South African woman we've talked about here before, who was exploited both in
life as the Hottentot Venus. And then again, in death, when her remains were
dissected, plaster casted, preserved, and displayed
against her wishes at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Given all this, Needham
advocates that the skin should be removed from the book and
given a proper burial. What we have here is what's known in the field of academia as a tough one, a toughy, the old gray area, no matter how you regard
anthropodermic bibliopegy, a term by the way that
Needham thinks sanitizes what skin books really are. Consent or the lack of consent must always be the main
focus of the story. Yes, there are stories
of people who did consent to having their skin used,
even wanted it to happen, but most died having no
idea what was to come. When we lose sight of this
or stop caring about it, we aren't telling the
whole story of these books, but does that mean that all human skin bindings should be
dismantled and buried somewhere, wiped out of libraries and
arbitrarily put in the ground? I'm not sure that's the answer either. - Well, I don't really
have a good answer for you, but what I can say is that
by showing and treating and talking about these books, we're able to foster really
rich conversations about consent that may not have ever happened. These books are concrete items
that people can relate to in the context of their
own personal experience. And what I see as my job
as a library director is to advocate and to care for these
books in the best way that I can, to advocate for their physical state, to advocate a sense of understanding, for this person's experience and to try to display them in a kind, caring, contextual manner for education. - When someone dies, they can donate their
entire body to science, like to a medical school. They can also donate just
their organs or they can donate just their skin or parts of their skin, making a tissue donation,
but that small skin donation, while noble, wouldn't be considered them, if you donated some of your
mother's tissue after she died and then had her cremated, you wouldn't say she had
been donated to science, you would say she had been cremated. Now some cultures may feel differently, but in the majority of
Western culture, her humanity, wouldn't be voided by that
missing piece of flesh. Mary Lynch's thigh skin, though, not an ideal or humane situation. And no part of her life was
an ideal or humane situation, is now being lovingly stewarded. If to bury someone properly
is to memorialize them, give them respect and care. Then to the best of our
ability now skin books, like those at the Mutter,
are being given just that. Where I most strongly
disagree with Needham, though I take and respect his point, is that skin books are not
comparable to Saartjie Baartman, whose organs and genitals
were horribly cut out, mutilated and preserved,
her skeleton put on display as an exhibit. These human skin books, the ones that have been
tested and confirmed, as well as those alleged human skin books that can't be tested because the institutions don't want
Paul Needham at their door, don't want that smoke. All will continue to be controversial. We were speaking to university
about coming to see their skin books for this video. It's not a prestigious American
university without a skin book, as they say, and
they kind of agreed. And then we're like, we don't
think it's the right fit. And part of me is sad that they
want to hide the books away, but I also get it. I have sympathy for it. They may not want the
attention or controversy, especially since no one currently
caring for the books now was around when they were
made or even acquired. So I'll leave you with this today. Do we keep skin books as
artifacts, teach the controversy, teach the changing understanding
of post-mortem consent and medical ethics, or do we bury, put them in the ground
as the human remains they really are? I've told you my thoughts, but don't take my word for it. Thank you to our delicious, wonderful patrons who make
these videos and all the travel and editing and research
that goes into them possible. (mysterious music) ♪ Butterfly in the sky ♪ ♪ I can go twice as high ♪ ♪ Take a look ♪ ♪ It's in a book ♪ ♪ A reading rainbow ♪ ♪ I can go anywhere ♪ ♪ Friends to know ♪ ♪ And ways to grow ♪ ♪ A reading rainbow ♪ ♪ I can be anything ♪ ♪ Take a look ♪ ♪ It's in a book ♪ ♪ A reading rainbow ♪ ♪ A reading rainbow ♪ ♪ A reading rainbow ♪
Caitlin is always good.
Just watched this yesterday. Fascinating and entertaining as usual!