The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has released an image database built from the full-text articles in the PubMed Central repository. When the database went online in October, it held more than 2.5 million images. For more background, read the NIH Press Release.

The images can be graphs, line drawings, illustrations, radiography, or photographs. To see some of the range of resources, view the results of this search on chorea.

While I find that quick word searches have worked well for my uses, there is an extensive help page explaining other ways to search as well as dissecting the images results page.

The database includes extensive holdings of genomic images, but I can see the database being useful in a community hospital setting. Perhaps you have just attended an in-service on wound vacs and wondered what types of wounds these devices are used to treat. The results aren't pretty, but here they are.

Please do keep in mind that while viewing these images to open to anyone, use of the images must comply with their copyright status.