Accuracy sometimes lost out to art in these recreations. An 18th-century Japanese anatomist gentrified his subject almost beyond recognition, sketching a set of delicate pink petals drooping from a trachea and calling them lungs, while a tangle of thick noodles in a head-shaped bowl passed for a brain. In 1911 a French surgeon went to the opposite extreme: he ran some preserved cadavers through a giant band saw and photographed the grisly results, thick slices of human being stacked like chops in a butcher’s display case. His cross-sections of trunk and limbs probably dazzled his readers but look entirely unremarkable to our M.R.I.-accustomed eyes.

Photographs of nurses in action include what must be the most prudent pinups in existence, with smiling young uniformed women modeling their winged hats. Another set of photographs consists only of hands: it was assembled in 1908 by a Cleveland dentist interested in chirognomny (“the science of deducing the characteristics of a man from the shape of his hands”).

Pages of drawings immortalize various human and animal “monsters,” with tallies of heads, limbs, horns or breasts exceeding the usual. Then comes a large X-ray of Hitler’s nose and teeth, an 1818 Japanese manuscript describing surgical anesthesia decades before it was first used in the West, and a first edition of Elbert Hubbard’s 1909 play “The Doctors: A Satire in Four Seizures.” (“Most doctors evolve the ills they profess to cure.”) The book’s illustrations are accompanied by short scholarly essays providing context and comment. But as with most narratives of attic, garage and storage bin, the words are secondary here, often no more than elongated murmurs of shock and pleasure at seeing the past again.