by Unknown
Cure
None, and why should there be? Ebercitas will never be discredited.4 It is the most wonderful disease eber—I mean ever! I have it! I want it! I dance, I caper! Farewell! She is my sweetheart. This entry is for her. I am trying too hard. Ven ¡ay! ven, amorosa guajirita! y mi alma no quire, zapatillas listas, vivir sin tu amor! (see Big Book of Spanish Serenades edited by Rodriguez Trinidad Fernandez Concepcion Henrique Maria, Lord of Arguento and Duke of Shadow Valley).
Submitted by
DR. RHYS HUGHES
Cross References
Diseasemaker’s Croup; Poetic Lassitude
5
Country of Origin
Kerguelen Islands, Southern Ocean
First Known Case
Nemo Omen, 16 September 1961, meteorologist, 33 years of age
Symptoms
Initial mood swings in response to external stress are followed by mental and physical mimicry, then palindromic verbalization. In severe cases, the condition involves corporeal mutation. According to the circumstances, this can be extreme in its extent and consequences: some individuals have been found fused to outcrops of rock, their newly brittle bodies crumbling under their own greatly increased mass, while others have dissolved in water.
History
Nemo Omen, a member of a French survey team on Kerguelen, began to behave erratically after several months stationed in this remote island group in the Southern Ocean, a barren and inhospitable environment subject to capricious and inclement weather. Initially, Omen simply aped his colleagues’ behavior and incessantly impersonated their various accents. His conduct was attributed to his long separation from his family and friends. Although Xavier Emordny, the camp doctor, monitored him closely, no immediate action was taken. Omen then began to demonstrate physical symptoms when he collapsed while conducting meteorological measurements during a heavy rain shower. His colleagues initially thought that he was suffering from a fever and sweating profusely until they carried him under cover and wrapped him in blankets. Omen’s deliquescing skin dried out immediately, and then began to bobble as it adopted the color and woven pattern of the blankets.
Dr. Emordny placed the patient in isolation, and began a series of tests intended to identify the condition and assess its potential risk to the expedition as a whole. Bearing a superficial resemblance to the reflection reflex described in The Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies, the novel syndrome was characterized by a chameleon-like response to the external environment. John Trimble and Rebecca Manard maintain that polar and sub-arctic environments have the potential to erase the psychological sense of the self as a discrete entity. Although the reflection reflex can be cured by surrounding victims with photographs of themselves, similar therapeutic interventions by Dr. Emordny only served to make his subject’s skin assume the texture of photographic paper.
The condition did not appear to be contagious in any conventional sense since there were no clinical signs of viral or bacterial infection. Nevertheless, other members of the expedition began to exhibit the tell-tale symptoms, and an outbreak of mass psychosis was suspected. Desperate attempts to isolate cases within the small infirmary led to a breakdown in supervision, allowing Omen and the other increasingly agitated patients to escape into the trackless and hostile interior of the Kerguelen mainland. Their chameleon-like abilities helped several victims of the syndrome to avoid detection entirely, while others, battered by the island’s frequent gales, may have literally vanished into thin air by becoming part of it.
Dr. Emordny insisted on abandoning the organized search parties and ventured cautiously into the Kerguelen hinterlands on his own. Once he managed to spot one of his patients from a distance through his pair of binoculars, he tentatively advanced toward the individual while taking elaborate care not to alarm the subject and so induce a camouflage reaction. When the approach was successful, the afflicted individual began to assume the appearance of the doctor. Emordny then persuaded his patients that they were in the presence of a sufferer of the disease. The victims rapidly assumed the role of the practitioner and led their doctor back to the medical facility. In this way, all the extant sufferers were returned to full-time medical care. Then, while still under the benign delusion that they were, in fact, health professionals, Nemo Omen and others allegedly identified and synthesized the curative therapy that eliminated the malady.
Cures
In devising his novel intervention to end the crisis, Dr. Emordny anticipated the words of the poet Alan Jackson, who wrote, “Truly the remedy’s inside the disease.” The remoteness of the location of the only recorded outbreak of this syndrome has led some authorities to cast doubt on the efficacy of Emordny’s therapy, and even whether the disease ever existed at all. Nevertheless, the doctor’s case report, which contains many ambiguous but disturbing photographs, was substantiated by all the members of the Kerguelen expedition who actually returned to France. It would be foolhardy to dismiss Emordny’s syndrome out of hand since it is a condition that holds up a mirror to our definition of the self, even if we are not pleased with what we see reflected in it.
Submitted by
DR. ANDREW J. WILSON
Cross Reference
Diseasemaker’s Croup
EMPATHETIC FALLACY SYNDROME6
EFS, Tacheoindurare
Country of Origin
England, United Kingdom (disputed)
First Recorded Case
Frederic Arctor presented with indeterminate symptoms at the North London clinic of Dr. Robert Loew in 1936. After a prolonged consultation during which Loew struggled to put Arctor at ease, the latter finally admitted to seemingly unrelated symptoms including insomnia, listlessness, irritability, depression, mild hallucinations, and erectile dysfunction. Later, Loew recalled that these were problems with which he himself had been troubled and had mentioned in passing in an attempt to win Arctor’s confidence. He arranged for his patient to be examined by a colleague, a man of first-rate abilities who happened to be plagued by debilitating self-doubt. Subsequently, Loew found Arctor displaying symptoms of acute paranoia. Convinced he was on to something, he decided to test his hypothesis by asking a young medical student of considerable torpidity to meet with Arctor. Afterwards, the patient was discovered in a state of immobility verging on paralysis.
Loew’s paper on the case was published in Lancet to widespread controversy. He listed the complex and diverse symptoms in meticulous detail, but it was his theorizing on EFS as a malady of the modem era, caused by the speed and alienation of contemporary urban life, that finally won him respect, and the right to classify and name the disease. He identified those most at risk of contagion as “nondescript individuals given to pathological self-effacement, unhindered by any apparent sense of embarrassment, yet harboring an unnatural craving for attention that causes them to mimic the psychological, emotional, and even physical characteristics of those with whom they come into contact.”
Symptoms
These range from flattering displays of imitative behavior, to more prolonged and severe episodes of psychological mimesis, such as that seen in the infamous Furriskey case (see “Angela Furriskey—Victim or Villain” in The Psycho-Social Paradox of EFS, by Dr. Imelda Trellis). In 1968, Mrs. Furriskey of Dublin assumed the symptoms of her paranoid schizophrenic husband, John. In doing so, she inadvertently burdened herself with the five separate personalities that had been identified as fighting for control of Furriskey’s mind. Tragically, one of these, the teetotaler Kaminer, persuaded Mrs. Furriskey to walk into the local Public House and kill eight people before turning John’s shotgun on herself.
Recent advances in medical science, especially epidemiology, have increased our understanding of the true nature of the disease. In particular, the groundbreaking research of Dr. Krempe of The Ingolstadt Centre for Psychic Rehabilitation, has shown that 27 per cent of cases of Persistent Vegetative State (brainstem death) had been misdiagnosed, and were, in fact, examples of a partic
ularly virulent form of EFS. It is almost impossible to detect this new strain in its early stages, when it prompts affectations identical to those found in people of an artistic disposition. This heightened sensitivity promotes a powerful but delusional empathy with nature. What distinguishes the victim of EFS from the true aesthete is the former’s gradual transference of empathy on to inanimate objects—they take on the characteristics of gateposts, or perhaps kitchen appliances, rather than of mountains or lakes. If not detected, the condition proves irreversible, leading to paralysis, an inability to perform meaningful social interactions, an imagined immunity to extremes of temperature and precipitation, and, finally, total organ failure as they strive to approximate the feelings and sensitivities of whatever object it is they have fixated upon.
Dr. Sarah Goodman is credited with citing the first case of Empathetic Fallacy Syndrome by Proxy, one Noodles Kropotkin, said to have projected his own feeling of social inadequacy, purposelessness, and ennui on to a third party, resulting in the latter’s petrification (see Goodman’s Journals for a full account).
History
Most experts now believe that the disease predates Loew’s classification, and have cited a number of historical cases of tacheoinduration as actual instances of Empathetic Fallacy Syndrome. A reference by Dalkey in The Guide to Psycho-tropic Balkan Diseases (ed. Geraldine Carter, M.D.), supports the argument that the Golem was a victim of EFS while the testimony, witting or not, from other sources, strengthens the case of those who claim that Olympia Coppelius, Narcissus, and Lot’s wife, if actual people, were all afflicted with the disease rather than with magick or divine intervention. Whatever the credibility of these cases, the claims by Randolph Johnson in Confessions of a Disease Fiend that it was the eminent Victorian John Ruskin who first discovered EFS have more to do with Johnson’s fondness for laudanum and the need to promote his disreputable tome than with the proper history of disease classification.
Cures
Despite our greater knowledge of the disease, science has not discovered a cure. The hopes invested in what were formerly seen as promising therapies that might reverse, or at least halt, the progressive petrification of sufferers—ensuring that those most at risk were always in mixed company (to avoid fixation on any one particular individual), and the more controversial proposal to encourage potential victims to limit their social interaction to the company of those more tedious than themselves—have proven to be misplaced. The somewhat predictable side effects—a sharp increase in conversations concerning the state of the weather, widespread garden gnome infestations, a proliferation of random acts of queuing, and an exponential growth in the number of cases of vandalism against recently installed works of public sculpture—have far outweighed any potential benefit to the victims of EFS. Such setbacks have led some clinicians to call for more radical and aggressive treatment regimes, with some hopes being held out for regular isolation in total sensory deprivation chambers, while the early results from the Blavatsky Clinical Trial, measuring the efficacy of psychic transference of dullness from those afflicted to the dead, are inconclusive.
Submitted by
DR. M.M. O’DRISCOLL
Cross Reference
Diseasemaker’s Croup
ESPECTARE NECROSIS
Also known as Necrosis Optimum
Country of Origin
United States (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
First Known Case
September 14, 1999. The first case I am aware of was that of one Ray Nessenbaum, a retired construction worker out of Oklahoma City. He came into the hospital claiming that his left leg had “died.” I asked him exactly what he meant. Did he mean that he was feeling some numbness in the leg, or that the leg was simply injured in some manner? He insisted that his left leg had died, and that his right leg was soon to follow.
An examination revealed nothing wrong with the right leg, but large masses of flesh on the left leg were, indeed, necrotic, and the left leg could not be saved.
Mr. Nessenbaum remained in the hospital for several weeks. During this time we attempted (without success) to delay the course of the necrosis. We also ordered a psychiatric consult to help Mr. Nessenbaum deal with his condition. He still insisted his right leg was going to die as well. We assured him that there were no signs of disease in the right leg. Mr. Nessenbaum informed us that he had always known this was going to happen to him—that he had prized his leg strength more than anything, and had been afraid of something happening to his legs for years—and now his right leg was going to die as well. Nothing we said could sway him from this belief.
One week later the right leg became necrotic and had to be amputated.
Symptoms
All known cases of Espectare Necrosis are typified by large areas of tissue death, preceded by the belief in the patient (or in the case of very small children, in their mothers or fathers) that terrible things are going to happen to particular parts of their bodies (or in the case of very small children, the body as a whole, dying piecemeal in accordance with the progress of the parents’ pessimistic ideation).
History
Several more cases of Espectare came into the hospital over the next few weeks, and in all of these cases the patients reported that a particular portion of their body—usually a specific body part such as a leg, arm, hand, lip, penis, ear—had died, or was in the process of dying. In all cases the patient’s fears proved to be well-founded. In only one case were the symptoms reversed, when an adolescent female appeared to “change her mind” about what was happening to her.
A disturbing trend developed during the ninth month of the outbreak. Mothers were bringing their young children (from infants up to the age of four) into the hospital complaining that their children were dying. When we examined these children we discovered that, indeed, the children displayed large areas of necrotic tissue. Alerted by the earlier cases of Espectare, my colleagues and I found ourselves amenable to the idea that the pessimistic expectation of disease need not reside solely in the patient. However, in the cases of small children who had not yet individuated, the expectation could reside in the parents of these children. In these cases the area of necrosis appeared to spread commensurate with the progress of the parents’ negative expectations.
Initial tests had to be performed, of course, to rule out Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. In order to do this, we instituted quarantine protocols and isolated the children from their parents to insure that the parents could not physically affect their children’s condition. This was an unfortunate situation, as many of the parents were forced to wait for their children to die without being able to go to them. It took a serious toll on our young patients, their parents, and the staff itself, triggering numerous resignations. Eventually, however, we were able to rule out Munchausen and the parents rejoined their dying children.
Unfortunately, the quarantine measures proved to exacerbate the parents’ pessimism, and necrosis spread rapidly through the children. Drastic treatment measures were implemented, including multiple surgeries to amputate tissue in advance of the disease. These surgeries were particularly wearing on our pediatric surgeons, who were forced to diminish the bodies of their infant charges at an alarming rate. In many cases professional confidence was destroyed and the hospital staff has never quite recovered.
Cures
It would seem to me to be the height of arrogance to suggest that there might be a cure for such a disease. Am I to say to a parent with a dying child, “Look on the bright side”? Certainly a degree of optimism is helpful in any patient’s treatment, but this seems a feeble remedy when faced with a condition that uses our most existential fears and apprehensions for our children to fuel the disease process. In fact, simply knowing the importance of maintaining optimism under these circumstances often only serves to drive a more profound, inescapable pessimism.