I have "Hide in Info Pane" and "Hide in Available Fields" unchecked for both the ItemHTML and ItemHTMLText fields.  In the past I seem to recall being able to see the contents of these fields in the Item Properties > Values section, as well as the "All Fields" sections of the Properties Pane.  But these fields don't appear in the Values section now.  They do appear in the All Fields section, but nothing appears in the value cell, even though there is HTML content displayed in the Doc Pane.

 

(Oddly enough, if I press Shift+F2 to try to display the content of these fields, a New Event dialog appears.)

 

The reason I mention it is, I think there might have been some cases in which it might be useful for these field contents to be accessible.  For example, I might want to extract some portion of the content of the ItemHTMLText field and put it into the Item field.  In fact I just imported some 1500 small text files into my database (did not choke, went beautifully, thanks), and the imported text is now contained as embedded HTML for each item.  I would prefer that text to be in the Item field,   I was thinking that I could make a pull equation for the Item field that would insert the ItemHTMLText into the Item field for those items.