Cabinets of Wonder

My friend was recovering from surgery. The tumor was entirely benign. “The doctor says it’s just a dermoid cyst,” she said. A what? We paused, as realization dawned. We had it: our search term. As any hypochondriac knows, a fresh new word from a doctor can set off a daylong orgy of medical Googling.

The word “dermoid” instantly popped the lid on a trove of primary sources, including a troubling collection of pathologists’ photos. My friend gasped. Dermoids are hideous, and more: they’re spiritually troubling. As malformed embryonic material, they have some human features, but the features are scrambled. Just one glimpse and I got that what-hath-God-wrought feeling. It didn’t help that a link or two away from the medical sites were sites with dermoid folklore, which connected such tumors to monsters and fables of the homunculus.

Patients who conduct extensive online research have become — no surprise — the scourge of physicians. Most doctors choose to dose patients with only the smallest effective levels of information. But digital-age patients have a high data tolerance. Medical Googlers tend to prefer the whole search-engine dragnet, which yields the data of everyone from snake-oil quacks, holistic shamans and huggy support networks to Mayo Clinic conferences.

Alas, as if doctor disdain weren’t enough to chasten the Googlers, graphic medical information turns out to be its own punishment. As I stared at the cyst pictures, my mind skipped through subjects medical, superstitious and existential. I kept thinking, We shouldn’t be looking at this. Monster tumors with inchoate eyes and teeth grow regularly in human bodies? This news flash belonged only in the hands of lab technicians, horror writers and maybe hard-core Balzac fans.

But what was most disturbing about the images was how often they appeared on nonmedical sites. Some people, it seems, look at the pictures recreationally. My friend recalled a scene in “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom diverts himself with a 17th-century manual filled with weird obstetrical images (“infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows”). They’re all sick, I thought. To look at this stuff for fun, without my — my — pure motive of becoming informed. That’s just wrong.

I noticed that one of the links to the cysts came from eBaumsworld.com, a wildly popular site for the Mad magazine set. EBaumsworld typically offers videos of skateboard wipeouts, mug-shot montages and bar-mitzvah embarrassments. In the midst of the har-har stuff, however, are darker pictures: deep gashes, prisoners talking explicitly about sex with a new inmate, bodies ravaged by crack cocaine. EBaumsworld also shows the execution of Saddam Hussein and videos of terrorist violence.

Another source of dermoid links was LiveLeak and the horrifying BigDucky, which feature videos of extreme real-life violence — including murders, executions and torture. On BigDucky, alongside a list of entries including “Islamic Extremists Behead Eugene Armstrong” and “Iraqi Terrorists Behead a Korean Captive,” ads run for ringtones, soft-core pornography and something called a “fart button.” Elsewhere, the site plays recordings of prank phone calls.

How did this juxtaposition happen? Certainly, there has always been in America a widespread audience for graphic material, as well as a widespread ambivalence about it. Interest in certain anatomical and scatalogical images is considered simply prurient. On the other hand, photographs of emaciated Somalians in the 1990s were considered required viewing for any American citizen seeking to understand the world. Equally mandatory were the disturbing tableaus from Abu Ghraib, which at the time of their discovery were plastered on front pages and projected at the center of human-rights conferences.

The Abu Ghraib images, as it happens, are always in heavy rotation on LiveLeak and BigDucky. What’s more, as LiveLeak meticulously compiles images of real-life violence from Iraq and around the world, it has unexpectedly become one of the most extensive public archives of war film. But if you turn to gross-out sites for news, whose company will you be in? That, I realized, was what chilled me most while I was examining the tumor photos. I had liked the idea of being an enterprising patient-advocate, an informed caregiver and even a gifted lay diagnostician. But that was when I was reading The New England Journal of Medicine. Once I found myself studying the photos near a fart button, or under the banner of “gross-out,” I wasn’t so self-satisfied.

You’re not supposed to look at disgusting stuff for the fun of it, right? It’s O.K. only when you’re learning something — how cruel people can be, how complex the body is or how you could intervene to improve the world. That’s why public television shows extreme violence on “Frontline,” or graphic images of childbirth.

But maybe that’s also why they show the stuff on gross-out sites. The prison-sex-interview video, according to an accompanying blurb on eBaumsworld, is intended as a deterrent to those who might risk incarceration. Images of obstetrical anomalies, as the blurbs on BigDucky say, are incentives for young people to use birth control. A video purporting to show a British airstrike on a Taliban complex drew comment on LiveLeak from around the world on American foreign policy and the ethics of aerial warfare.

And let’s not be naïve: the motives of journalists, human rights workers, documentarians and doctors who draw attention to nauseating images are not always pure. In his terrific book about nonfiction writing called “Follow the Story,” James B. Stewart argues that “writers cannot count on anyone to read their work out of a sense of obligation, moral duty or abstract dedication to ‘being informed.’ ” Instead, he says, the best stories in journalism engage an amoral quality in the reader: curiosity. Stories that are strange work best; we want to see what’s weird, what’s unexpected, what we’re not supposed to see.

We look at the Abu Ghraib photos, or skateboard wipeouts, or even dermoid cysts, because we’re curious. Curiosity powers every Internet vision quest. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But we shouldn’t call it courage either.

Points of Entry

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS

POLITICALLY WHACKED OUT: The filmmaker Errol Morris classifies his movies as either “politically concerned” or “completely whacked out.” “Standard Operating Procedure,” his new documentary about Abu Ghraib, crosses those genres. By focusing on the role of photography, Morris both illuminates and obscures the practice of torture in the Iraqi prison. Watch the site errolmorris.com for news about the film, which had its premiere this month in Berlin.

STEP RIGHT UP: Founded in 2001 in Rochester, N.Y., by Eric Bauman and his father, Neil, eBaumsworld.com styles itself as “media for the masses.” To find out just what that means, you must turn to the site, now owned by HandHeld Entertainment. A resurrection of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum for the Web, eBaumsworld offers news of the weird, shocking, gross and hilarious from all over.

THE MORGUE IN THE MUSEUM: “Bodies: The Exhibition” opened in Tampa, Fla., in 2005; it has shown or is still showing in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Cincinnati, Branson, Mo., Prague, Lisbon, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Las Vegas, New York, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Washington. Polymer-preserved cadavers are artfully displayed to reveal various functions and oddities of the human body. Check it out, and the video online: Bodiestheexhibition.com.