Joseph Leidy, a surgeon for the Union Army, used skin from a Civil War soldier to cover his own book, An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, which he donated to the Mütter.

Rising in popularity during the 17th and 18th Centuries, the practice of binding books in human skin, anthropodermic bibliopegy, fell off due to its macabre nature near the end of the Victorian Age.

By the 19 th century, some doctors were binding anatomy books with human skin, considering it a “fitting gesture.” There is much discourse among researchers as to why anyone did this.

One featured in Angemi’s book is a 3-pound benign cystic tumor in the ovary of a 38-year-old woman from the Netherlands who thought constipation was causing her bloat.

Harvard removed the human skin binding from a book held in Houghton Library and apologized for “past failures in its stewardship of the book” in a statement Wednesday.

Harvard University announced it would remove a binding made of the skin of a deceased woman from the 19th-century book “Des Destinées de l’Ame,” which they house in their library.

How “Gray’s Anatomy,” a book of drawings featuring blood vessels, muscles, the nervous system and other squeamish things, came to be one of the world’s most widely read books ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Harvard University said it has removed human skin from the binding of a 19th century book about the afterlife that has been in its collections since the 1930s.

The book is called Marvel Anatomy: A Scientific Study of the Superhuman. It features more than 100 anatomical illustrations by artist Jonah Lobe (Skyrim) and is written by Marc Sumerak and Daniel ...

Books Bookbinding the Dead: Harvard Confirms 19th-Century Book Bound in Human Skin Allison Meier June 5, 2014 ... Illustration from “Death’s Doings” by R. Dagley (1827) (via the British Library) ...