Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Surgery

When you read about how awful surgery was in the past, you really begin to appreciate today's technology. On that note, sometimes it's fun and informative to flip back through yester-years disastrous methods of science. From laborious explanations of surgeries to detailed illustrations of the practices, this book on 1800 surgical science is at the very least extremely interesting.

As a personal observation: while flipping through this book I realized that most of the illustrations are white dudes with beards, which makes the whole thing that much more interesting and eerie.