The story of a book bound in human skin, held in Harvard University's Houghton Library for nearly a century, captures a complex intersection of ethics, history, and the academic handling of human remains. The book in question, Des destinées de l’âme by French novelist Arsène Houssaye, presented to his friend Dr. Ludovic Bouland in the late 19th century, now resided in Harvard’s Houghton Library. This volume, considered a minor work in Houssaye's oeuvre, contains meditations on the human soul—an ironic yet morbidly fitting content for its binding material. Dr. Bouland, who bound the book, claimed it was apt for a treatise on the soul to be encased in human skin, the cover taken from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke.