“I have seen my death!” Anna Bertha Röntgen is said to have exclaimed upon seeing the first X-ray photograph ever made – an image of the bones in her hand. It was her husband, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895.

The news that someone had found a way of peering through human skin and flesh to look at the skeleton beneath, without so much as touching the subject, was an international sensation. Soon, X-ray photographs revealing bones and even the shadowy impression of internal organs were being published in newspapers around the world.

And it wasn’t long before the fantasy of X-rays entered popular culture. “Around her ribs, those beauteous twenty-four, Her flesh a halo makes, misty in line, Her noseless, eyeless face looks into mine. And I but whisper, ‘Sweetheart, Je t’adore’,” read the lines in one poem published in Life magazine a year after Röntgen’s discovery. X-rays were both sexy and seen as a sort of superpower – an idea eventually made immortal by the 1940s writers of Superman comics. They gave their hero – what else – X-ray vision.