The Book of Human Skin (71 page)

There are also historical cases of people spreading smallpox deliberately, by using powdered scabs. Santo correctly cites the case of the British general Sir Jeffery Amherst, who in 1763 sent ‘sundries’ to the Ottawa Indians of Pennsylvania, having first sprinkled them with powdered scabs. There is another story, from the 1860s, of a grave-robber who serviced a medical college in Cincinnati. Fed up with pranks played on him by the anatomy students, he infected a number of them deliberately, by delivering to them the corpse of a smallpox victim for dissection. A case of a love letter transmitting the disease was recorded in 1901, when a woman in Saginaw, Michigan, was infected by a
billet-doux
posted from her sweetheart in Alaska.

For my medical research, I used as many contemporary sources as possible. Santo’s wisdom is imperfect, and of its time, being based on what he might have read himself in Charles Roe’s
A treatise on the natural smallpox, with some remarks and observations on inoculation
(1780) or Robert Dickinson’s
An essay on cutaneous diseases, impurities o[ f] the skin. And eruptions of the face
(1800) or Lorenz Heister’s
Medical, chirurgical, and anatomical cases and observations
(1755).

The reader will of course realize that the gangrene infection in Minguillo’s fingers has nothing to do with smallpox, though both are brought to him courtesy of the book of human skin, the first via paper cuts and the second via breathing in the powdered scabs. Santo’s account of the progress of the disease does not conform to modern observations. The lesions of smallpox evolve through various stages – from maculae to papulae to vesicles to pustules to scabs – but remain discrete and do not coalesce.

One other thing to note is that the concept that a bacillus could cause human disease did not really originate until later in the nineteenth century. It was only in 1898 that a French scientist, Paul-Louis Simond, made public his research that showed that the plague bacillus was transmitted to humans via the fleas of rats. At the time this story is set, it was believed that the plague was spread by contaminated dust inhaled, ingested or absorbed via skin lesions. The plague has never completely disappeared: the last major outbreak was in India in 1994. I am grateful to William Helfand for referring me to the vital text on this matter: M. Simond, M. L. Godley and P. D. Mouriquand,
Paul-Louis Simond and His Discovery of Plague Transmission by Rat Fleas: a Centenary
(1998).

Nor was the blame for spreading malaria squarely laid upon mosquitoes until the latter part of the nineteenth century: at the time of this novel medical theory concerning the disease was dominated by the fashionable theory of ‘miasmas’ of malignant fragments.

Books of human skin

Human skin has more uses than one. Stories of its extracurricular roles are as numerous as they are hard to verify. It was claimed that girdles made of human skin were worn to facilitate childbirth in mediaeval Bavaria. It is said that the Hussite general John Zisca ordered his skin to be made into a drum for frightening his enemies after his death. A Paris surgeon is rumoured to have presented a pair of human-skin slippers to the
Cabinet du Roi
. Hermann Boerhaave, the Dutch physican, was said to have in his collection of medical curiosities three full human skins and a shirt made of internal organs, as well as a pair of high-heeled ladies’ shoes in human leather. An executed convict had furnished the skin; his nipples were used to decorate the instep.

Since a fashion emerged in the seventeenth century for domestic display, tattooed skin fragments of sailors and slaves have found their way into ‘cabinets of curiosity’ in the private homes of ‘ordinary’ people. And in recent times Dr Gunther von Hagens has made a fortune from his show of ‘plastinated’ corpses – treated, flayed and displayed.

Human skin has been displayed for martial reasons for far longer. Herodotus records that the ancient Scythians flayed and tanned the skin of their enemies. There are accounts of marauding Danes who pillaged Christian churches in Britain being skinned and their hides nailed to the doors of the churches they had violated. (Even if this was not true, it was no doubt a discouraging story for other Danes who might have contemplated attacks.) There is one hideous incidence of flaying in early modern Venetian history: Marcantonio Bragadin was skinned alive by the Turks after the Battle of Famagosta in 1571. His body was stuffed with straw and paraded through the city. Eventually the loyal Venetians mounted a raid on the Turks’ arsenal in Constantinople and stole Bragadin’s skin. It now reposes in a black marble urn on his tomb at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, with the actual flaying depicted in pastel paint above a bust of the hero.

A slave called John Brown was used for experiments by a doctor, Thomas Hamilton of Clinton, Georgia, who subsequently made a fortune with a quack cure for heatstroke. Among other things, over a nine-month period Hamilton flayed skin from the slave’s body, in order to see how deep the black pigmentation went. Brown’s sufferings were recorded in his memoir
Slave Life in Georgia
, first published in 1855.

A set of playing cards made of human skin was among the exhibits at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. It was said that the cards had been captured from an Indian tribe.

Books bound in human leather – by a practice known as ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’ – have always been a rather specialized item. But then book collectors have ever been known for their unusual ways. Leon H. Vincent, in
The Bibliotaph and Other People
(1899), wrote: ‘Yet the most hostile critic is bound to admit that the fraternity of bibliophiles is eminently picturesque. If their doings are inscrutable, they are also romantic; if their vices are numerous, the heinousness of those vices is mitigated by the fact that it is possible to sin humorously.’

Harry Lyman Koopman, in his 1916 work
The Booklover and His Books
, observed: ‘The binding is, therefore, a part of a book’s environment, though the most intimate part, like our own clothing, to which, indeed, it bears a curious resemblance in its purpose and its perversions.’

The Bibliothèque Nationale is said to hold several volumes that incorporate human skin: a thirteenth-century Bible (fonds Sorbonne no. 1297) which was supposedly made of
peau de femme
but is more likely to be actually wrapped in the parchment from a stillborn Irish lamb; another thirteenth-century Bible (fonds Sorbonne no. 1625) and a text of the Decretals (fonds Sorbonne no. 1625) seem more likely to be bound in human skin.

The first well-known examples of the human-binding craft are from the late sixteenth century. Often there was a thematic link between the binding and the contents of such books: for example, Brown University’s John Hay Library owns a 1568 anatomical work,
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
, ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’, by Andreas Vesalius, as well as two anthropodermic editions of the
Dance of Death
.

Anthony Askew, an eighteenth-century physician, was reputed to have had his
Traité d’anatomie
bound in human skin. American doctors began to show an interest in anthropodermic bibliopegy in the nineteenth century. Joseph Leidy had an 1861 edition of his
Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy
with the following inscription: ‘The leather with which this book is bound is human skin, from a soldier who died during the great Southern rebellion.’ Dr John Stockton-Hough, who first diagnosed trichinosis in Philadelphia, used the skin of patients he lost at the Philadelphia Hospital to bind various volumes of medical texts, including two on fertility issues for the human female. Dr Stockton-Hough observed that the skin of a woman’s thigh was difficult to distinguish from pigskin. Two of his books may be seen in the Philadelphia College of Physicians’ Library, along with Joseph Leidy’s.

It is not known if the original owners of the bindings gave their permission for such use. Some of the human leather used for these medical and religious books is likely to have come from poor patients whose bodies were unclaimed after their deaths in hospital.

Harvard’s Langdell Law Library has a Spanish law manual from 1605 bound in human skin. An inscription explains that the binding is the skin of the owner’s dear friend, one Jonas Wright, who was skinned alive by an African tribe in 1632. The book, ‘being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions’, was returned to his friend along with a piece of his skin for the binding.

The French Revolution, which provided a wealth of corpses, appears to have inspired a number of human book bindings. Several copies of the French constitution of 1793 were said to be bound in the skin of some of the revolution’s countless victims. Royalists spread the rumour that the revolutionaries kept a vast tannery of human skin at Meudon. It was alleged in 1794 that in Angers human skins were also tanned to make riding breeches for army officers.

The early nineteenth century saw new sources of human leather emerge from the law courts. In Great Britain, wealthy book collectors were able to buy the skins of criminals who had been executed and anatomized. It was considered a part of the punishment that the offender would know in advance that his body was to be dissected by the surgeons. This was the fate of the notorious grave-robber William Burke, executed in 1829. After a public dissection, a piece of his body was tanned, and made into a wallet.

Sometimes the skins of criminals were used to bind accounts of their deeds and their trials, execution and eventual dissection. This was the case with John Horword, hanged for the murder of Eliza Balsum in 1821. A copy of his book – in every sense – is at Bristol’s City Record Office, inscribed ‘
Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood
’ and decorated with skulls and crossbones. At Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, there’s a similar volume on – and in – William Corder, the infamous killer of Maria Martin in the ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ scandal of 1828. The museum also displays Corder’s scalp and ear. Two copies of the memoirs of the irrepressible highwayman James Allen, alias George Walton, were bound with his own skin in 1837 with a stamped inscription ‘
Hic Liber Waltonis cute compactus est
’. Walton had requested that a copy be given to one John Fenno, one of his victims, who had impressed the criminal with a brave resistance when attacked. The other was given to his doctor. Fenno’s family eventually gifted the book to Boston Athenaeum’s library.

There is one story of a woman requesting that her skin be used to bind a book. A young noblewoman was dying of tuberculosis, a disease which, in its latter phases, sometimes shows erotic symptoms. Although they had never met, she became obsessed with the French writer and astronomist Camille Flammarion, who had captured the public’s imagination with his works on the stars and his theories of life on other planets. One version of the tale claims that the woman summoned him to her, announcing that she planned to bestow a gift he could not refuse. Another account insists that she had her hero’s portrait tattooed on her back, leaving orders for her doctor to cut it out of her when she died so that it might be tanned and sent to Flammarion to bind his next book. Whatever the truth of the story, it appears that a copy of Flammarion’s
Les terres du ciel
was indeed bound with female skin in 1882. In a gilt inscription, the binding is described as ‘a pious execution of an anonymous vow’. In a letter, Flammarion claimed that the woman was unknown to him, but acknowledged that he had received the skin. He observed ‘this fragment of a beautiful body is all that survives of it today, and it can endure lastingly in a perfect state of respectful preservation’.

The Grolier Club of New York owns a volume entitled
Le Traicte de Peyne: Poeme allegorique
, published in Paris in 1867. The flyleaf is inscribed in pencil, ‘Bound in human skin’, though this claim has not been verified.

A young German named Ernst Kauffmann sought a similar immortality. Despairing of success as a writer himself, he put together a book of
Two Hundred Famous Men
illustrated with woodcuts, requesting that it should be bound in his own skin after his death.

Human skin scandals abounded at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, feeding a new taste for the macabre in a reading public desensitized by Jack the Ripper and other cases described in lurid details in the popular press. In 1883 the infamous Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts was accused of selling the skin of its wretched inhabitants – principally the pauper insane – to local tanners. A whole industry in human hide was suspected. There was a tale of some French medical students being dismissed after being caught selling the breasts of dead female patients to the binders of obscene books in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. This led to an alleged sighting of the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine et Juliette
bound with a pair of human breasts.

The Wellcome Collection in London has a gynaecological treatise that was originally printed in Holland in 1663. The title page reads:
De Virginitatis notis, Graviditate & partu
. It consists of a number of illustrated essays on the female reproductive tract, the first of which is a piece by Séverin Pineau on virginity, pregnancy and birth. At some point the volume was acquired by a doctor, Ludovic Bouland, who had an interest in bookplates and artistic bindings. Bouland was born in Metz and had graduated in medicine at Strasbourg in 1865, thereafter practising in Paris. Dr Bouland had the book rebound in the skin of a woman which he had obtained when he was a medical student.