NOT SURPRISINGLY, when the photographic process was first discovered in France in 1839, it was immediately recognized as an inherently credible method of medical illustration because of its reliability and accuracy in representing things the way they truly were. It was not long before photographs were being used as a method of physically showing difficult-to-describe technical details, operative results, and surgical pathologic features. In America, the initial use of medical photographs for illustrations, mainly in periodicals, involved woodcut representations of daguerreotypes, which first appeared in 1848. Six years later, actual photographs (silver-salt, albumen prints) began to be "tipped" or glued into books, periodicals, and various monographs and reports. These works are rare and highly prized by collectors. Beginning in 1872, as the photographic publishing process became more sophisticated, photographs were able to be mechanically incorporated onto the actual printed page. Although not as valued as tipped-in illustrations, those publications with