England, 15th century · National Library of Sweden

Five Metres of Surgery

John of Arderne (1307–c. 1380) was one of England's first scholarly surgeons, and his treatise on anal fistula stayed in use until the late 1600s. Dozens of manuscripts of his work survive, mostly plain working copies. This one is not. It is a scroll of six calfskin sheets, 542 centimetres long and 36 across, painted with more than 120 figures and four full-length anatomies. It was too long ever to be used at an operating table. It was probably made for a wealthy London woman, and it has been linked to Philippa, an English princess who became queen of Sweden. Scroll down it below. The ruler on the left gives your depth.

At the top. The scroll is 5.42 m long.

The Arderne scroll, six painted calfskin sheets joined top to bottom: text in columns, painted courtiers in the margins, four large anatomical figures and a series of infants in wombs.

That was the front. The back carries the same four figures again, in the same place, traced through the vellum and painted as if seen from behind. None of the four great anatomies is labelled or tied to the text around it. On the reported length, the scroll is 17 feet 9 inches; hung from an ordinary 2.5 m ceiling, more than half of it would lie on the floor.

Sources: the Public Domain Review, “Anatomy Unzipped: John of Arderne's Sweden Scroll”, text by Thea Applebaum Licht, for every fact above; the image is the PDR's stitch of the scroll from the National Library of Sweden (digitalt.kb.se, dark-35562843), marked public domain. I cut the six sheets apart and stacked them in order, the two sheets with the four figures first, as the PDR describes them descending. The photographs come out 14.5 times as long as wide against the reported 15.1, so the edges are probably trimmed a little; the ruler follows the reported 542 cm. The PDR's title dates the scroll c. 1425–35 and its text 1430–50. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.