Then a rising professional class, many doctors sought to distinguish themselves by scholarly activities and, in America, "rare book collecting would become deeply ingrained in what it meant to be a member of the doctoring class." Though one might hypothesize that someone sinister created these books, most were made by gentleman doctors during the 19th-century. This marks the beginning of Rosenbloom's obsession with "anthropodermic bibliopegy" and the opening scene to Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, an adventurous tale of how one librarian's morbid curiosity leads her across the Atlantic and back as she investigates the origins, motivations, and techniques behind this macabre bookbinding practice. The caption explains these books are closed because their binding is more notable than their contents, and that's because they were made from human skin. In an inconspicuous corner, she discovers a display case of leather-bound books with their covers closed - unusual for rare books. Megan Rosenbloom, a young librarian-in-training, wanders through the Mütter Museum's collection of medical oddities. Now, zoom ahead to modern-day Philadelphia. Hough used this preserved human skin to bind three of his most prized books, all of which dealt with women's health. Hough is not most famous for this discovery but, rather, for what he did immediately afterward: He cut a slice of Lynch's skin from her thighs and preserved it in a chamber pot.
Lynch was the first known case of trichinosis in Philadelphia. Under a microscope, his vision swam as countless tiny worms wriggled around. Hough opened Lynch's chest cavity to inspect her tuberculosis-wracked lungs, he noticed an unusual cyst in her pectorals. John Stockton Hough stooped over an autopsy table to examine the emaciated corpse of Mary Lynch. Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, by Megan Rosenbloom
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