The skeleton artists from the title page of Erasmus Wilson’s A system of human anatomy, general and special (1847) 
Image from Supplement to Campi Phlegraei : being an account of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the month of August 1779 
Page from 18th century “Artzney buch,” an unidentified German manuscript recently digitized by the National Library of Medicine.
Are you looking for a way to access the millions of images locked within our hundreds of thousands of books? Recently, the Medical Heritage Library Inc. began reaping millions of images from books and journals in our online collection and providing in-depth book level metadata to these images via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhlimages/.
Once you select an image, you have the ability to click a link taking you back to the page in the actual online book for context. By scrolling down, you’ll discover links that allow you to:
“See all images from this book”
“See all MHL images published in the same year”
“See all images from [Contributing] Library”
Despite the massive swell of digitized texts over the past twenty years, systematically unlocking images in a large corpus of books with enough metadata to provide some basis for analysis has been a challenge. The ability to find and analyze images is on the wish list of many of the researchers using the MHL. While the metadata helps connect researchers to the actual book, the MHL at this point lacks the ability to provide a way for researchers to search for individual images within this massive corpus. We invite you to tag the Flickr images, but we are working with colleagues on a new program that will help batch tag and sort millions of images based on machine reading and recognition. We also recognize that our images filters do not always keep “visual junk” out, so please be patient as we work out the bugs. Stay tuned!