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Seeking the Truth Behind Books Bound in Human Skin
And the “gentleman” doctors who made them.
Seeking the Truth Behind Books Bound in Human Skin
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An anatomical engraving from 1872. traveler1116/Getty Images
In This Story
, published in October 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In the summer of 1868, a 28-year-old Irish widow named Mary Lynch was admitted to Ward 27 of Philadelphia General Hospital. Nicknamed Old Blockley, this huge facility for the poor in West Philadelphia contained a hospital, an orphanage, a poorhouse, and an insane asylum. Just four summers prior, some walls in its Female Lunatic Asylum—“being undermined by workmen”—collapsed, killing 18 women and injuring 20 more. Patient care at Blockley was a far cry from physician house calls for the wealthy; it was a place for the desperately ill poor, and Lynch’s tuberculosis (then called phthisis) put her in a dire situation.