The beginning student of histology is frequently confronted by a paradox: diagrams in many books that illustrate human microanatomy in a simplified, cartoon-like manner are easy to understand, but are difficult to relate to actual tissue specimens or photographs. In turn, photographs often fail to show some important features of a given tissue, because no individual specimen can show all of the tissue's salient fea tures equally well. This atlas, filled with photo-realistic drawings, was prepared to help bridge the gap between the simplicity of diagrams and the more complex real ity of...