he procedures in place at the New York Academy of Medicine Library—one of the finest medical libraries in the country and the only one in Manhattan to open its doors to the public—are a study in secular ritual: You browse the library's online catalog, submit electronic request slips for the titles you're interested in, then take a seat in the stately, early Romanesque reading room, and . . .

Wait. And wait. True to cliché, dust motes hang in the sunbeams that fall slantingly through the high, arched windows, across the wild beasts cavorting in the 16th-century tapestry on the east wall. The insect tick of your watch's second hand sounds suddenly loud. Horns drift up from the street, only a few stories below but a world away. In the fullness of time, a staff member arrives, wheeling a cart piled high with books, among them your pickings from this garden of unearthly delights.

Tucked away on Museum Mile, the academy library is the sort of place that would make blood brothers of Nicholson Baker and Joel-Peter Witkin. Here are books on forensic pathology and morbid anatomy, wax models of skin diseases and the occult origins of kidney stones. Books worth perusing for their titles alone, such as the 1973 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Nude Mice or William A. Rossi's Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe (1976). Books to treasure for their homiletic wisdom, such as Robert A. Matthews's How to Recognize and Handle Abnormal People (1960), "a manual for the police officer" whose sage counsel will prove useful at family functions or office meetings. Books to savor for their droll wit, such as Sublime of Flagellation, an 18th-century bagatelle in the guise of letters from "Lady Termagant Flaybum, of Birch-Grove, to Lady Harriet Tickletail, of Bumfiddle-Hall."

More sobering are the library's annals of pseudo-scientific bigotry, innocent-looking old tomes such as George Franklin French's Eradication of Syphilis and Crime by the Extirpation, in That Class, of the Procreative Power, a call for the sterilization of the underclass, presented to the Maine Medical Association in 1878. Here, too, are clinical inquiries into nature's crueler sports, such as Fredrik Ysander's Studies on the Morphology and Morphogenesis of Human Thoracopagic Monsters, With Special Reference to the Malformation of the Heart (1924)—"thoracopagic monsters" being conjoined twins, fused at the upper trunk, face to face.

Traditionally, medical libraries have guarded the profession's hard-won knowledge jealously. By closing their doors to the masses (whose interest, it was assumed, could only be voyeuristic), they maintained the mysteries, and thus the power and status, of the white-coated priesthood. By contrast, the New York Academy of Medicine—a socially responsible nonprofit dedicated, in the words of its Web site, "to enhancing the health of the public through research, education and advocacy, with a particular focus on disadvantaged urban populations"—has sought, from the first, to raise public consciousness about health care issues and to deprivatize medical knowledge, as it did when the Fellows voted, in 1878, to admit the public to the academy's newly founded library.

New York Academy of Medicine Library 1216 Fifth Avenue 212-822-7300

This intellectual transparency has had a fringe benefit—or, more accurately, it has benefited the fringe, providing ready access to a mother lode of what the SF novelist J.G. Ballard calls "invisible literature"—medical textbooks, scientific journals, and other gray matter. Although it comprises a veritable galaxy in the cosmos of print media, invisible literature is nowhere to be found in general-interest bookstores and is never reviewed in mainstream book pages for the simple fact that no one thinks of this stuff as literature in the literary sense of the word.

Or, at least, no one did until Ballard began promoting the notion, in interviews and essays throughout the '60s and '70s, that beyond the narrow bandwidth of the literary narrative as the mandarins at The New York Review of Books conceive it lies the vast spectrum of scientific, corporate, and official communications, from Gray's Anatomy to interoffice memos to congressional white papers, all of which can be read as literature. Seen in the right light, asserts Ballard, the Warren Report reads like "the novelization of the Zapruder film" and the Los Angeles Yellow Pages is "as surrealist in its way as Dalí's autobiography."

Take a seat in the Academy Library and thumb through the Journal of Forensic Sciences or Autoerotic Fatalities (1983) by Roy Hazelwood, Ann Burgess, and Park Dietz. As you read, the walls seem to dissolve into the starless dark beyond the far rim of human experience. Here, a 42-year-old man accidentally hangs himself from a rope attached to the raised shovel of his backhoe tractor. "Determination of autoerotic death was made from decedent history and circumstantial indicators. The victim kept a journal of love poetry dedicated to his tractor that he had named 'Stone,' outlining his desire for them to 'soar high' together." A 40-year-old airline pilot tells his wife he's going pistol shooting in a rural area. Later, a fisherman finds him at the end of an isolated road, crushed to death against the rear fender of his Volkswagen Beetle, nude and covered with "confluent skid-type abrasions." Apparently, the deceased had chained himself, by the neck, to the bumper and rigged the car to run in slow, concentric circles, so that he could jog alongside it in a sadomasochistic playlet whose plot remains unclear. But, as the medical examiner who wrote the case report dryly notes, he committed a grave "pilot error" by allowing the car to run over the chain, which wound around the back axle, strangling him. "Once again," the author deadpans, "we have graphically illustrated the fact that we know very little about some aspects of human behavior."

Immersed in the pathos and perversity of these sick-sad psychodramas, you realize with a jolt that the actors might be living next door. The perfunctory observation, in case report after case report, that the decedent "had no known psychiatric history and no known deviate behavior," reminds us that there's more dark matter in the human cranium than is dreamt of in the traditional novel. An hour spent with an issue of The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology makes the ostensible normalcy of most characters in middlebrow fiction seem suddenly, jarringly abnormal. In the pages of such journals, we catch glimpses of a post-human fiction in which media bombardment has shattered the introspective psyches of conventional fiction into multiple personalities; in which interpersonal relationships have given way to the fetishistic rituals and obsessive behaviors of an ever more autistic age, when human contact is being replaced by the user interface. More than the tub-thumpings of this year's Young White Male Genius come to save the novel from its slide into irrelevance, the collective unconscious that speaks to us through mail-order catalogs, corporate mission statements, and cockpit voice-recorder transcripts is closer to the bone of what we are as a society. They're a truer mirror of our age than the social novel imagined by Tom Wolfe in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," his 1989 call for the cloning of Zola. Intentionally or not, the invisible literature written by psychologists, pathologists, and others who specialize in the deviant mind or the monstrous body beckons us toward a psychogeography unimagined by most fiction writers—a narrative landscape where the airline pilot throttled by his Love Bug and the man wedded in death to his beloved backhoe co-star in an autoerotic remake of Love Story.

Mark Dery's most recent book is The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a collection of essays on contemporary culture.

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