The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  Marcella enters Santa Catalina in 1816. The priora at Santa Catalina at that time was Sor Fátima de Nuestra Señora del Carmen y Araníbar, who was succeeded in 1817 by Manuela de Santa Cruz y León. However, I have used instead the name Mónica. The personality of my priora is confected from the portrait painted by Flora of her relative, and, of course, from the imperatives of the story.

  The process of admission would involve an interview with the priora and then an agreement on the dowry, as explained in the novel. The contract would be signed by the father who consigned the nun – she would only sign it herself if she was over twenty-five years old. Girls were admitted at the age of fourteen or fifteen usually, and remained novices until they were allowed to profess at the age of eighteen. The act of profession was deliberately theatrical, like a wedding, as described in the novel.

  In theory, the nuns were supposed to enter the convent of their own accord, but there would have been a certain amount of family pressure. In the revolution-torn unstable times of the early nineteenth century, Spanish fathers would consider that they had delivered their daughters into safety if they consigned them to a convent. And there is, of course, a certain amount of self-interest in a family entrusting a daughter to a convent: given that the nuns were supposed to pray continuously for the souls of their family members, in order to lessen their time in Purgatory.

  At this time there were around fifty-three of the velo negro (black-veiled professed nuns), twenty-eight of the velo blanco (white-veiled serving nuns), twelve laywomen who had invested their fortune in a retired life and sixty-two lay people working in and around the convent for its maintenance. There were seventy servants and slaves of every variation of blood: mestizas, negras, mulatas, sambas and others.

  As previously mentioned, some real names are used in the book. The nuns came mostly from Arequipa and the surrounding areas. But Dante Zegarra’s list of nuns who entered Santa Catalina between 1810 and 1820 includes a Sor Juana Francisca from Lampa, a Sor María from Cuzco and a Sor Manuela from Lima. One velo blanco nun is listed as hija natural (illegitimate daughter). The velo negro nuns were generally of pure Spanish blood, though born in Peru. There is a record of a nun born in Spain being admitted to Santa Catalina in 1964.

  The dowries were tailored to the fortunes of the families of the nuns. Many girls brought as dowry pieces of land that were rented out to lay farmers. The convent sometimes traded dowry objects and even slave girls to keep the convent fed, warm and supplied. The dowry letter Minguillo signs in the oficina is based on a document that is still preserved in the museum at Santa Catalina.

  I have taken the names of some of my nuns from the friends that Flora made, even though my story takes place almost fifteen years earlier. For example, a Margarita from Bolivia was thirty-three in 1834 when Flora was there. She had been at Santa Catalina since she was two.

  As described in the novel, visitors were allowed by permission of the priora. They would be escorted to the locutorio (parlatorio in Venice) which was inside the first courtyard. The nuns would arrive at the narrow chamber via the second courtyard. Facing them were five grates. All conversations were supervised by the priora, whose office had a grate into the locutorio, or by another nun.

  It is true that a real cult of the baby Jesus arose among enclosed nuns in the New World and the Old. In some convents, the nuns were even allowed ‘baby Jesus’ dolls to cradle and dress up. This does not appear to have been the case at Santa Catalina, but the cult of El Niño Jesús was certainly strong there. I have invented the excess to which Sor Loreta takes this matter, though Veronica Giuliani recorded a similar phenomenon, in her case with a painted icon of the Madonna and Child.

  It appears that certain pets were allowed, and it is true that at Santa Catalina some nuns kept fleas in bottles, partly to show their devotion to all living things. A beautiful green flea bottle (pulguero) is displayed in the convent’s museum.

  There was no lunatic asylum in Arequipa at the time this novel is set, and nor was there a medical school. Sick nuns were attended by doctors and blood-letters in the oficina of the priora, or cared for in the convent’s own infirmary.

  Sor Loreta’s accounts of the trials of Bishop Chávez de la Rosa reflect the historical facts. The noble nuns were very active in claiming and maintaining their rights. For example, they later also demanded and upheld the right to have their sisters buried within the convent walls, even when this was challenged on health grounds. Now they are buried in a crypt in the grounds. The relatively luxurious existence so deplored by Sor Loreta at Santa Catalina continued until strict reforms were imposed in 1859, bringing the lifestyles of the nuns more into line with those in European convents.

  Santa Catalina was declared a National Historic Monument in 1944, which saved it from some radical and destructive rebuilding plans proposed in the 1930s.

  In the 1970s, a far-ranging programme of careful restoration and building work took the convent back to its original structure, with a new area provided for the modern nuns, which meant that tourists could be permitted to visit the older parts of the convent during certain hours. The colours of the convent were carefully restored to the lowest stratum of paint found during the repair works. It was at this point that the internal streets of the convent were given their names: these were not in use at the time this book is set.

  The convent opened its doors to the public on August 15th 1970, the 430th anniversary of the founding of Arequipa. The visitor may now wander through two hectares of winding alleys, cells and cloisters. Some cells are fitted out with furniture from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At a café near the back gate (through which Marcella escapes) visitors can eat biscuits and cakes cooked by the nuns. A wonderful recent innovation is to allow candlelit visits by night, a truly chilling and moving experience, when the convent seems to plunge back through four centuries of history.

  The sala de profundis, used for wakes, still contains thirteen portraits of dead nuns, painted between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Most are painted with their eyes shut, though one shows Sor Juana Arias with her eyes open, as they were when she was found dead in her cell. Many nuns are crowned with flowers, particularly roses, like Santa Rosa of Lima. The historians Dante Zegarra and Alejandro Málaga Núñez-Zeballos concur that nuns were not painted in their lifetimes during this period.

  In other parts of the New World, for example in colonial Mexico, portraits of nuns, both alive and dead, were actually very popular. The paintings of monjas coronadas reached quite extravagant heights, with the nuns shown in exuberant jewelled crowns and towering headdresses of multi-coloured roses.

  Marcella’s faked self-immolation would have been regarded with horror. The Catholic Church relaxed its dictate against cremation only in the 1960s.

  The treasure of the convent, in the form of valuables from the nuns’ dowries, is now displayed in the old infirmary, in the arches that used to protect the beds of the sick from earthquakes. It includes beautiful china, paintings, lamps, statues and silver. A wonderful collection of art hangs in the former dormitories of the serving nuns, with many examples of the so-called Cuzco School of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Christian imagery subtly adapted to local tastes by indigenous artists. Compared with contemporary ecclesiastical art in the Old World, these New World Christs were darker-skinned and wore Peruvian clothes. The Madonnas wore pyramidal robes that very much recall mountains. These paintings were often bordered with patterns of South American flowers and birds.

  Today, a part of Santa Catalina still functions as an enclosed convent. But since 1985 nuns have been permitted to go out into the city, if accompanied, for specific tasks. They still occupy themselves with needlework, and examples can be purchased in the convent’s shop. Pope John Paul II visited Arequipa in 1985, and beatified one of the convent’s most beloved nuns, Sor Ana de los Ángeles Monteagudo (1602–86).

  Gioachino Rossini

  Rossini’s first operatic success took place in V
enice and he harboured a lifelong affection for the city. The famous Duetto buffo di due gatti – funny duet for two cats – is attributed to Rossini, but it appears to have been compiled from fragments of his opera Otello (1816) by another musician about ten years later.

  Remedies

  The fox pasting given to Marcella in the country and the recipe used by Minguillo to conceive a male child come from Sextus Placitus’ Medicina de Quadrupedibus, which suggests all kinds of cures using animal parts.

  The folk medicines stocked at Minguillo’s Novo Mondo apothecary were among the items given much popular credibility as cures and prophylactics in the early nineteenth century.

  All the books quoted by Santo are real, and can be found in the British Library or the Wellcome Library at London’s Wellcome Collection. Santo would have loved the great works on dermatology published by Robert Willan, On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert, Description des maladies de la peau (1806), but he would not have been able to afford them. Monkshood or aconite is indeed a deadly poison, and the flowers, and the effects of ingesting them, are as described. There is no known cure for a serious poisoning.

  ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ is an invention of the author’s.

  Disinfection of mail, and transmission of smallpox by paper

  Smoking, perfuming and dousing in vinegar were supposed to purge letters of yellow fever, leprosy and plague . . . which, as it turned out, could not be transferred by paper. The only killer disease that can be transferred by paper is smallpox. To destroy it requires an intense heat treatment, such as the determined application of a very hot iron.

  V. Denis Vandervelde, founder of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, writes:

  While disinfection was practised against half a dozen infectious diseases in the early nineteenth century it was quite ineffective against almost all of them. Smallpox was so widespread that it was not normally a cause for disinfecting mail, but it could have been conveyed on dry paper at this time in Arequipa. We have reliable records of smallpox in Chile from 1554 and in Peru from 1802. The Spanish authorities in Latin America were keenly promoting Jennerian vaccine against it from the first years of the nineteenth century.

  In the year 1804–5 there was a worldwide alarm about yellow fever and it is likely that travellers from the New World would have been detained in a Venetian lazzaretto, and any mail would probably have been ‘perfumed’ (in a box with sweet-smelling herbs). More serious treatment, including scorching, was reserved for plague mail.

  There was much less concern then until 1814–16, when there were outbreaks of plague in the Kingdom of Naples, the Ionian Isles and Malta. Yellow fever was much less of a threat until 1819, when the Spanish and Portuguese resumed splashing suspect mail with vinegar.

  Smallpox is remarkably resilient. Spores kept at room temperature can survive for years. Frozen samples of the virus can be revived decades later. A British doctor records scabs dried in peat smoke and stored in camphor being viable for inoculation procedures eight years later.

  There are also historical cases of people spreading smallpox deliberately, by using powdered scabs. Santo correctly cites the case of the British general Sir Jeffery Amherst, who in 1763 sent ‘sundries’ to the Ottawa Indians of Pennsylvania, having first sprinkled them with powdered scabs. There is another story, from the 1860s, of a grave-robber who serviced a medical college in Cincinnati. Fed up with pranks played on him by the anatomy students, he infected a number of them deliberately, by delivering to them the corpse of a smallpox victim for dissection. A case of a love letter transmitting the disease was recorded in 1901, when a woman in Saginaw, Michigan, was infected by a billet-doux posted from her sweetheart in Alaska.

  For my medical research, I used as many contemporary sources as possible. Santo’s wisdom is imperfect, and of its time, being based on what he might have read himself in Charles Roe’s A treatise on the natural smallpox, with some remarks and observations on inoculation (1780) or Robert Dickinson’s An essay on cutaneous diseases, impurities o[ f] the skin. And eruptions of the face (1800) or Lorenz Heister’s Medical, chirurgical, and anatomical cases and observations (1755).

  The reader will of course realize that the gangrene infection in Minguillo’s fingers has nothing to do with smallpox, though both are brought to him courtesy of the book of human skin, the first via paper cuts and the second via breathing in the powdered scabs. Santo’s account of the progress of the disease does not conform to modern observations. The lesions of smallpox evolve through various stages – from maculae to papulae to vesicles to pustules to scabs – but remain discrete and do not coalesce.

  One other thing to note is that the concept that a bacillus could cause human disease did not really originate until later in the nineteenth century. It was only in 1898 that a French scientist, Paul-Louis Simond, made public his research that showed that the plague bacillus was transmitted to humans via the fleas of rats. At the time this story is set, it was believed that the plague was spread by contaminated dust inhaled, ingested or absorbed via skin lesions. The plague has never completely disappeared: the last major outbreak was in India in 1994. I am grateful to William Helfand for referring me to the vital text on this matter: M. Simond, M. L. Godley and P. D. Mouriquand, Paul-Louis Simond and His Discovery of Plague Transmission by Rat Fleas: a Centenary (1998).

  Nor was the blame for spreading malaria squarely laid upon mosquitoes until the latter part of the nineteenth century: at the time of this novel medical theory concerning the disease was dominated by the fashionable theory of ‘miasmas’ of malignant fragments.

  Books of human skin

  Human skin has more uses than one. Stories of its extracurricular roles are as numerous as they are hard to verify. It was claimed that girdles made of human skin were worn to facilitate childbirth in mediaeval Bavaria. It is said that the Hussite general John Zisca ordered his skin to be made into a drum for frightening his enemies after his death. A Paris surgeon is rumoured to have presented a pair of human-skin slippers to the Cabinet du Roi. Hermann Boerhaave, the Dutch physican, was said to have in his collection of medical curiosities three full human skins and a shirt made of internal organs, as well as a pair of high-heeled ladies’ shoes in human leather. An executed convict had furnished the skin; his nipples were used to decorate the instep.

  Since a fashion emerged in the seventeenth century for domestic display, tattooed skin fragments of sailors and slaves have found their way into ‘cabinets of curiosity’ in the private homes of ‘ordinary’ people. And in recent times Dr Gunther von Hagens has made a fortune from his show of ‘plastinated’ corpses – treated, flayed and displayed.

  Human skin has been displayed for martial reasons for far longer. Herodotus records that the ancient Scythians flayed and tanned the skin of their enemies. There are accounts of marauding Danes who pillaged Christian churches in Britain being skinned and their hides nailed to the doors of the churches they had violated. (Even if this was not true, it was no doubt a discouraging story for other Danes who might have contemplated attacks.) There is one hideous incidence of flaying in early modern Venetian history: Marcantonio Bragadin was skinned alive by the Turks after the Battle of Famagosta in 1571. His body was stuffed with straw and paraded through the city. Eventually the loyal Venetians mounted a raid on the Turks’ arsenal in Constantinople and stole Bragadin’s skin. It now reposes in a black marble urn on his tomb at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, with the actual flaying depicted in pastel paint above a bust of the hero.

  A slave called John Brown was used for experiments by a doctor, Thomas Hamilton of Clinton, Georgia, who subsequently made a fortune with a quack cure for heatstroke. Among other things, over a nine-month period Hamilton flayed skin from the slave’s body, in order to see how deep the black pigmentation went. Brown’s sufferings were recorded in his memoir Slave Life in Georgia, first published in 1855.

  A set of playing cards made of human skin was among the exhibits at the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia in 1876. It was said that the cards had been captured from an Indian tribe.

  Books bound in human leather – by a practice known as ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’ – have always been a rather specialized item. But then book collectors have ever been known for their unusual ways. Leon H. Vincent, in The Bibliotaph and Other People (1899), wrote: ‘Yet the most hostile critic is bound to admit that the fraternity of bibliophiles is eminently picturesque. If their doings are inscrutable, they are also romantic; if their vices are numerous, the heinousness of those vices is mitigated by the fact that it is possible to sin humorously.’

  Harry Lyman Koopman, in his 1916 work The Booklover and His Books, observed: ‘The binding is, therefore, a part of a book’s environment, though the most intimate part, like our own clothing, to which, indeed, it bears a curious resemblance in its purpose and its perversions.’

  The Bibliothèque Nationale is said to hold several volumes that incorporate human skin: a thirteenth-century Bible (fonds Sorbonne no. 1297) which was supposedly made of peau de femme but is more likely to be actually wrapped in the parchment from a stillborn Irish lamb; another thirteenth-century Bible (fonds Sorbonne no. 1625) and a text of the Decretals (fonds Sorbonne no. 1625) seem more likely to be bound in human skin.

  The first well-known examples of the human-binding craft are from the late sixteenth century. Often there was a thematic link between the binding and the contents of such books: for example, Brown University’s John Hay Library owns a 1568 anatomical work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’, by Andreas Vesalius, as well as two anthropodermic editions of the Dance of Death.

  Anthony Askew, an eighteenth-century physician, was reputed to have had his Traité d’anatomie bound in human skin. American doctors began to show an interest in anthropodermic bibliopegy in the nineteenth century. Joseph Leidy had an 1861 edition of his Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy with the following inscription: ‘The leather with which this book is bound is human skin, from a soldier who died during the great Southern rebellion.’ Dr John Stockton-Hough, who first diagnosed trichinosis in Philadelphia, used the skin of patients he lost at the Philadelphia Hospital to bind various volumes of medical texts, including two on fertility issues for the human female. Dr Stockton-Hough observed that the skin of a woman’s thigh was difficult to distinguish from pigskin. Two of his books may be seen in the Philadelphia College of Physicians’ Library, along with Joseph Leidy’s.