The Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, contains many rare and beautiful books, some of them very fragile. One of them, "Om Spedalskhed" (On Leprosy), by D.C. Danielssen and C.W. Boeck, published in Bergen, Norway, in 1847, contains a series of superb coloured plates of the clinical pathology of leprosy as seen in patients in the leper hospital, Bergen. This video presents a selection of these plates to demonstrate the potential of videotape for making rare and fragile works more widely available for study.