( CNN ) -- It 's reading matter not for the faint of heart . Experts at Harvard said this week that they have confirmed that a 19th-century book housed in one of the university 's libraries is bound in human skin . Scientists and conservators carried out a series of tests on Houghton Library 's copy of the French writer Arsene Houssaye 's `` Des destinees de l'ame '' and concluded with 99.9 % confidence that the binding material came from a human . According to the library , Houssaye presented the text , described as `` a meditation on the soul and life after death , '' to one of his friends , a book-loving medical doctor , in the mid-1880s . The recipient , Dr. Ludovic Bouland , bound the book `` with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke , '' the library said . Bouland left a note in the volume explaining what he had done . `` A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering , '' he wrote . Centuries-old practice . Although binding a book in another person 's skin may seem creepy nowadays , the library says it was n't always so unusual and reviled . `` Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy , the binding of books in human skin has occurred at least since the 16th century , '' it said . `` The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted , or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book . '' Bouland refers in his note to another book in his collection , SÃ©verin Pineau 's `` De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis , '' that was also covered in human hide . The skin on that 17th-century volume , now in the collection of the Wellcome Library in London , is tanned with sumac , a natural dye . Sheepskin rivals . The macabre version of `` Des destinees de l'ame '' was deposited at Houghton Library in 1934 by a book collector and given to the library permanently 20 years later by the collector 's widow . The Crimson , Harvard 's college newspaper , reported in 2006 that there were at least three books in the university 's vast collection that were bound in human skin . But Houghton Library said that testing of the other two volumes , at the Harvard Law School Library and the Harvard Medical School 's Countway Library , established that they were actually wrapped in sheepskin . `` Houghton 's book is now the only known book at Harvard bound in human skin , '' said the library , the college 's main repository for rare books and manuscripts . Tests to rule out apes . The tests , taking microscopic samples from various parts of the binding , allowed analysts to identify the source of the material through its proteins . The analysis of `` Des destinees de l'ame '' matched `` the human reference , and clearly eliminated other common parchment sources , such as sheep , cattle and goat , '' said Bill Lane , the director of the Harvard Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory . But the scientists had to do further tests to make them confident that the binding did n't come from another primate closely related to humans , like the great apes and gibbons . World 's 10 weirdest museums .
Scientists carry out tests to determine source of 19th-century book 's binding . They say they are confident it 's of human origin . Score: 6 `` A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering , '' a note says .