I'm squealing with delight at the moment. Not too long on the heels of the Royal Society releasing some of the most famous scientific articles to the public, the National Library of Medicine has released scans of some of the most beautifully illustrated science books! You can literally "turn the pages". Once only available by visiting the Library, you can now check it out at home.

There are only a few books, but they include Robert Hooke's Micrographia,  one of the first descriptions of microbes! Vesalius's book on human anatomy, with some of the first drawings of physiological mechanisms and associations. As well as other medical texts from the 1400s and 1500s!

 Simply breathtaking - medieval medicine in its artistic glory. The very foundations of everything we know about the human body, laid to bare in those pages.

 If you don't want to flip through the books, they offer galleries of the images in them as well.