In some ways, they are exactly what you would expect to find in a medical museum.

Three separate volumes on women's health, two from French publishers in the late 1600s,

and a third from London a century later.

Every good medical library needs books, after all, so it's surprising to learn that these

three tomes are locked away, rather than on display in the facilities' museum.

Not because the topics they cover have gone out of date, although there's no doubt they are far from current,

and not because they had somehow been censored by the institution.

No, these three books are not on display at the Mooter Museum in Philadelphia because they are bound in human skin.

To be more specific, their spines are bound in skin from the thigh of a woman

named Mary Lynch, who passed away in 1869. It seems that the physician who cared for her

in the hospital, Dr. John Stockton Huff, also conducted her autopsy, and for some reason he removed

some of her skin and tanned it. Years later, he used that human

leather to bind three of his favorite medical books, texts on women's health bound in the

skin of a woman, and that's why they aren't on display for just about every ethical reason you

could imagine. What he did was very wrong, and yet, here they are.

These three objects, known as anthropodermic books, exist in a duality. They are pieces of medical

history valuable for the text they contain, but they are also, literally, human remains.

You just can't tell at first glance.

And in many ways, that's true of a lot of history.

The people, places, and events we think we know, often have another dimension to them.

Yes, sometimes what you see is what you get.

But every now and then, there's more to the story, because history

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