“possible to request a kind of immortality like this in your own will.”

October 30, 2015 9:01 AM

The Strange Case Of The Woman Whose Skin Was Turned Into A Book [Buzzfeed] No one knows much about Mary Lynch apart from the fact that her thighs are wrapped around three medical books in The College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Historical Medical Library.

“Hough took her skin to a basement room in the hospital and tanned it in a chamber pot. Experts suggest he would have cured it in one of two ways: the traditional method (soaking in lime water, then removing any flesh, fat, or hair by hand before leaving the skin to soak in lime water for a few more days, before moving it to increasingly strong baths of tannin) or the urine method (urine was used for thousands of years in this way – the ammonia dissolves flesh, fat, and hair). No tests have been done to be certain either way, but given he worked in a hospital he no doubt had a lot of urine to hand. It would have taken a month, if not several, to fully tan the thighs of Mary Lynch.”

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