Scraps of paper recovered from a set of 16th-century books are from a compilation of 3rd-century Roman laws thought to have been lost to history, scientists say.

The book's first owner, French physician Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933), created the binding with the skin of a deceased patient in the hospital where he worked while he was a medical student.

Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the name given to the process of binding books in human skin, and there are examples housed in museums across the globe. As you might expect for such grim artifacts ...

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Harvard Removes Book Binding of Human Skin.