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The sensual artistry we first used to visualise our cells and tissues | Aeon Essays

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Driven by insatiable curiosity, early histologists revealed the hidden structures of cells in works of sensual artistry

The locked drawer, the unopened box – we all know how it feels to want to see inside. In most of us, curiosity peaks at childhood, or morphs, in adulthood, into a hobby. But there are those for whom the desire to see becomes an almost spiritual imperative, one that they must live by. They are scientists, in particular naturalists, and their impulse manifests in different ways. Some have looked outside the physical self, at the world around them or in the skies, while others have turned their attention inward, to the human body itself. It is a radical, disturbing about-face, a transgression…

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