Japanese prints show tiny workers running the human body

Nineteenth-century ukiyo-e artists including Utagawa Kunisada made these health warnings, with a companion print staffing the female body.

Japanese woodblock prints — National Library of Medicine / no known copyright restrictions (Wikimedia Commons)

Inshoku Yojo Kagami, or "Mirror of the Physiology of Drinking and Eating," is a nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock print of a man eating fish and drinking sake, with his torso cut away to show the crew of tiny workers keeping him going. Some …