On 3 July 1977, Raymond Damadian and colleagues completed one of the first full-body magnetic resonance imaging scans of a human being. The early machine was crude and slow, but it proved that nuclear magnetic resonance could be used safely to see inside the living body. MRI later transformed diagnosis in neurology, oncology, cardiology, and trauma medicine.

MRI changed the modern imagination of inwardness: the hidden body could now be pictured without cutting it open. Late twentieth-century poets increasingly used medical imaging as a metaphor for memory, illness, exposure, and self-knowledge, extending older poetic traditions of the heart and soul into technological language.