Photographs taken through microscopes are among the most basic tools of scientific research, but the techniques for doing so required the invention of appropriate cameras, and so are not even 150 years old. In the US, one of the people who developed the technique early on was J.J. Woodward, one of the Army Medical Museum's curators assigned to writing the medical part of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion.
Woodward took thousands of photographs in which he experimented with photomicrographs using sunlight, artificial lights and specialized stains. Woodward created masterful photomicrographs while using an entire darkened room as his camera. The schematic on this page shows that the lens was a microscope in a window, with a heliograph focusing sunlight though the slide and microscope. The image was projected onto a glass plate negative mounted in a wood box, two to four feet from the ...
