Gabor Lukacs’ 2008 book, titled “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery”, is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of Western scientific influence on East Asia. It focuses on two Japanese illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery derived from European medical sources in Dutch. This review article first surveys the organisation and contents of the book, then tackles consistency, typesetting and copyediting issues, then moves on to problems with transcriptions and translations of Chinese and Sino-Japanese materials, and finally discusses Lukacs’ approach to Chinese premodern knowledge. Richly illustrated yet mainly descriptive, pervaded with amateurish enthusiasm, ideological biases and value judgments, the book illustrates the persistence of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘exoticism’ in academic publications.