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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating stuff. While I can understand the decision and defend it, how is it really any different from making mummies 'properly' buried according to our current rituals?

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I would hazard a guess that the remains of a mummy still present interesting research opportunities, whereas the skin here is just skin, and there’s no real value in keeping it around other than the sensational. IIRC last time I was at the Museum of History in Ottawa they had noted that many of the indigenous artifacts on display are replicas - for many artifacts where they felt everything that they could learn had been learned, they have returned the originals to the people they were taken from. I feel this is a similar story.

A physician binding a book in the skin of his patient seems like a sick psychopathic power move. This is similar to the recent case of a surgeon who branded a transplanted liver with his initials.

The removal of the skin binding is symbolic, and is a small initiative in the gestalt of righting historical wrongs and creating a just society.

There is no such thing as a just society that does actions of this type. Destroying evidence of the past to fit your worldview is fundamentally unjust.

> This is similar to the recent case of a surgeon who branded a transplanted liver with his initials.

It’s not that similar, is it? Most people would object to the doctor flaying grandma, but there are interviews with that surgeon’s former transplant patients who don’t seem too bothered they may have been branded.

> surgeon who branded a transplanted liver with his initials

If anything, I'd be happy if the surgeon engraved his initials on my liver. This likely means he was proud of his work.

OTOH, I've seen people evading any mention of their name in the public releases of software code of horrendous quality by institutions, so I can relate this to my profession. Anonymous work correlates with bad work.

then put in a museum, solved.

who's museum? The British Museum?

I guess time passed? There are no potential relatives to Tutankhamen that might make claims. I would be rather pissed if there was a book with my great grandmas mentally ill sister's skin on it.

In a similar vain, there are a lot of skeletons and organs collected from dead mental patients in universities that did not get proper consent.

Were mummies not usually aware of, and presumably consented, to mummification before death?

And then there’s the angle of sparing library staff from handling the human skin.

I am not an Egypt buff, but that contradicts my understanding of that civilization so I apologize in advance if that is not accurate.

Some pharaohs took their slaves to the other sides and as I understand, those slaves were mummified to travel to the next world.

As for the anguish, is it any different really than holding any other significant artifact with a story behind it ( executioner's sword, kingdom's crown that changed hands often )? Is the issue that skin is just too visceral and it was easier for university to 'remove skin' than hire less squeamish help?

Are mummies general kept in a general library where anyone can poke at it upon request?

I mean, the fact students spent decades challenging each other to touch it (and the library did nothing to prevent it) might be a start

There was no consent.

But why is the current value-set overriding historical curiosity owned by Harvard to the point that they effectively destroy some of its uniqueness due to current mores and focus on 'consent'.

I guess the real question is 'why do you think consent overrides everything else and, more importantly, should we disassemble pyramids, because they were built without the consent of its slave labor?'

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