L’homme vapeur - engraving, 1903

Styled as a medieval knight, the walking, smoking mechanical man is propelled forwards by a petrol-powered steam engine which vents through his cigar. These illustrations, re-imagining the body as a mechanical or industrial system, became ubiquitous in the 1900s and were popularised by Fritz Kahn’s series entitled "Man as an Industrial Palace".

Today, "Medical imaging phantoms" are materially identical to human organs parts. These "phantom" organs are used to calibrate and test the interpretative capacity of x-ray and MRI technologies. They are like tuning forks that tease at the blind spots in diagnostic machinery.