Anatomy of a Cover

I write about forgotten women.

Not because women are particularly easy to forget. History has simply worked remarkably hard to remember everything except their names.

It remembers the men who studied them. The men who diagnosed them. The men who photographed, institutionalized, collected, dissected, murdered, published, and profited from them. It preserves the physician’s credentials, the collector’s provenance, the murderer’s last meal, and the museum’s hours of operation.

The woman becomes a blank.

Sometimes literally.

In 1869, a twenty-eight-year-old Irish immigrant named Mary Lynch died at Philadelphia General Hospital, then commonly called Old Blockley. It was the hospital where people went when they could not afford to go anywhere else.

Mary had tuberculosis. While hospitalized, she contracted trichinosis after eating contaminated pork brought to supplement the hospital’s food. By the time she died, she was five feet two inches tall and weighed sixty pounds.

Parasites had invaded her body and consumed what illness left of her.

Then came John Stockton Hough.

Hough was a young physician with a particular interest in trichinosis. He performed Mary’s autopsy, published his observations about the parasites he found inside her, and removed a piece of skin from her thigh.

He took Mary’s skin into the hospital basement and tanned it in a chamber pot.

A chamber pot is a toilet.

I am making that explicit because history likes to polish its language until brutality acquires a respectable shine. “Tanned in a chamber pot” sounds quaintly antique until you understand that he took skin from the thigh of a dead woman and made leather from it in something people pissed in—possibly using the urine itself in the tanning process.

Then he kept her skin for eighteen years.

John Stockton Hough studied parasites and became one.

A novelist could not include that detail without being accused of trying too hard. A parasite enters a body, takes what it wants, and survives by turning someone else’s life into something useful to itself.

Hough recognized the parasites inside Mary Lynch beneath his microscope.

He apparently did not recognize the one looking through it.

In 1887, Hough used Mary’s skin to partially bind three books from his private collection. The books concerned conception, reproduction, women’s bodies, and childbirth.

Of course they did.

Two were written by men: Robert Couper and Louis Barles. Their theories belong to the medical understanding—and misunderstanding—of their time.

The third was written by Louyse Bourgeois, a seventeenth-century French midwife who spent decades delivering babies and recording what she learned from the women she treated. At a time when men were beginning to claim authority over childbirth, Bourgeois put a woman’s knowledge of women’s bodies into her own words.

These books are not modern medical science. Their value now lies in what they reveal about the history of medicine: what people believed, what they observed, what they misunderstood, and who was permitted to call herself an authority.

Then, more than two centuries later, Hough put another woman’s body over Bourgeois’s words.

He did not write any of the books. Mary did not choose them. Their authors did not choose her for their covers, and Mary did not choose their words for what remained of her body.

One man simply decided that he possessed sufficient authority to revise them all.

He took books he had not written and changed their bodies with a dead woman’s skin. In one case, he laid one woman’s stolen body over another woman’s hard-won voice.

Then he added the results to his collection.

That is not merely bookbinding. That is a man making a monstrosity of other people’s work and expecting everyone else to admire the stitching.

What possessed him?

Perhaps possession is precisely the word.

Hough possessed the books. He possessed Mary’s skin. He possessed the professional authority to combine them because no one with greater authority was present to stop him.

The books belonged to him.

Mary did not.

The female body has always fascinated medicine. The woman living inside it has been treated as considerably less important.

For centuries, women’s suffering could be explained by a wandering womb, weak nerves, excessive feeling, insufficient feeling, sexual desire, lack of sexual desire, motherhood, childlessness, menstruation, menopause, disobedience, imagination, or that marvelously efficient diagnosis capable of swallowing nearly any symptom whole:

Hysteria.

The word grew from the Greek word for uterus. They put the accusation directly in the diagnosis. Whatever was wrong with a woman could be explained by the fact that she was one.

Modern medicine eventually retired some of the language without entirely abandoning the idea. Women were excluded from medical research because our hormones fluctuated. Our menstrual cycles complicated the data. Pregnancy was a risk. Apparently, the cleanest way to understand human health was to study men and apply the results to everybody else.

Men were the standard.

Women were men with inconvenient accessories.

For much of my own lifetime, medicine has continued learning how to treat women from research that frequently did not include us. Researchers are still discovering how diseases present differently in women, how medications affect us differently, and how many of our symptoms have been ignored because they failed to resemble those observed in men.

Apparently, excluding half of humanity did not complicate the science.

That history is part of what makes Mary’s bindings so obscene. Medicine found the living female body inconvenient but the dead one remarkably versatile. Women were too variable to include in the research but sufficiently interchangeable that one woman’s skin could cover three books about all of us.

Mary’s body stopped complicating the data once she could no longer object. Then it could be examined, opened, published, preserved, collected, and bound.

Hough may have believed he was preserving a medical specimen. Perhaps he considered using Mary’s skin to cover the books an honor. Men have done astonishing things to women and called them tributes.

He wrote an inscription inside each volume explaining that the binding was human. He wanted future readers to understand that the books were unusual. Valuable. Worth opening.

He recorded the woman as “Mary L___.”

An initial and a line.

Enough identity to authenticate the object.

Not enough to return the person.

Mary’s skin required provenance. Her life did not.

Hough’s name remained whole. His handwriting survived. His publications survived. His medical interests, marriages, addresses, library, and possessions found their way into the historical record.

Mary received one letter and a blank.

She had already been reduced by tuberculosis and trichinosis until she weighed sixty pounds. Hough reduced her again: patient into cadaver, cadaver into specimen, specimen into material, material into cover.

Then the cover became the reason anyone remembered that she had existed.

A cover is supposed to protect what matters inside. Mary’s skin had protected what mattered inside her. Hough took it from her body and made it protect someone else’s words instead.

Then history used the cover to conceal the woman.

I write about women like Mary. Women turned into mysteries after men took away the answers. Women remembered by crime-scene photographs, medical records, newspaper headlines, museum labels, and the possessions left behind. Women whose stories survive inside documents written by people who did not consider them the subject.

I write because absence leaves evidence.

A crossed-out name still presses into the paper. A missing page changes the binding. A blank is not always an empty space. Sometimes it is the shape left behind when someone has been deliberately removed.

That is why “Mary L___” bothers me so much.

Hough knew her name. He knew enough about her to describe her body, publish her disease, preserve her skin, and document its use. Yet when he placed her remains inside his library, he granted her only enough identity to make his books more interesting.

She became the cover story.

His was the name in full.

For more than a century, John Stockton Hough remained legible.

Then a woman opened the books and read past him.

Beth Lander, then College Librarian at the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, noticed that one of Hough’s inscriptions contained more than an initial. He had included the woman’s admission date, the date she died, and her cause of death.

The details he considered useful for documenting a specimen were enough for someone else to begin searching for a person.

Beth followed them into the surviving records of Philadelphia General Hospital. She read the dates, the diagnosis, the place of birth, and the fragments of a life that institutional paperwork had accidentally carried forward.

There she found the rest of the name.

Lynch.

Her name was Mary Lynch.

There is something painfully beautiful about a librarian doing what the physician did not. Hough read Mary’s body and found something he could exploit. Beth Lander read his record and found Mary Lynch.

A man reduced her to a patch of skin and an unfinished name.

A woman went looking for the rest of her.

Beth Lander’s name belongs in this story because witnesses belong in stories too. History often remembers the man who performs the act and forgets the woman upon whom it was performed. It can also forget the woman who later enters the archive, recognizes the absence, and refuses to leave it unfilled.

Restoring Mary’s name cannot restore what was taken from her. It changes the record, but it does not release her from it.

The books still exist.

Mary’s skin is still attached to them.

They are held in the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, above the Mütter Museum. Below, visitors walk among the remains medicine collected. Above their heads, Mary remains partially bound to three books about women’s bodies.

Her name is no longer missing.

The rest of her has not been returned.

That is the anatomy of a cover. It can protect, decorate, disguise, or conceal. It can preserve the words inside while hiding the person made into its surface. It can make an old text appear to be something its author never intended and turn a woman into something she never consented to become.

Hough covered three books with Mary Lynch.

In doing so, he covered Mary Lynch with himself: his curiosity, his authority, his collection, his handwriting, and his decision about what her body meant and what it should become.

Medicine has spent centuries writing on women, writing about women, and writing women off. Mary was made into the covers of words about bodies like hers and nearly disappeared inside the story a man made from her.

Then another woman read past him.

That is the work I recognize.

Not making forgotten women famous. Not making their suffering beautiful. Not turning what happened to them into another fascinating object for someone to collect.

Witnessing.

Following the line someone expected to remain blank.

Returning the name without pretending that a name repairs everything.

She was born in Ireland. She crossed an ocean. She was poor. She was sick. Someone brought her food because they were trying to help her. She suffered. She died. Her body still belonged to her after she was no longer there to defend it.

She was not a binding method, a medical curiosity, a parasite’s host, or an interesting addition to a physician’s library.

She was Mary Lynch.

John Stockton Hough left only her first initial and a line where the rest of the woman should have been.

Beth Lander followed that line until it became a name again.

But Mary Lynch is still upstairs.

Still part of the covers of three books she never chose.

Still on the shelf.

Her name has been returned.

Her skin has not.

—NB

Continue the rabbit hole: I explored the wider history of books bound in human skin in the voice of Lore Lassen, a fictional author and character from my novel VORLASS. Read her companion Oddment, Bound in Skin, on her character website.