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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.