The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

by Unknown

  Amundsen admitted privately that the first expedition hadn’t suffered from engine failures. The blimps worked fine, but the entire crew went temporarily blind, due to the bites of Arctic zigzag fleas. Amundsen would never have attempted a second voyage except for the 1925 Guide, which featured Dr. Amelia Dupré’s informative essay on Arctic fleas and their place in the pharmacopoeia of the Inuit tribes. Another resounding success made possible by the Guide.

  Crazes Of The Twenties

  The Roaring Twenties were a craze-ridden era for the United States. In the 1929 edition, disease psychologist Sarah Goodman established that flagpole-sitting, goldfish-swallowing, phone-booth-stuffing, public petting, and jitterbugging were all the consequences of a single mood-altering organism, which she christened Semantic/Venereal Imbalance Pathogen or SVIP.17 Although etiology and remedies were published in the Guide for all to read, Dr. Goodman’s article went unheeded by the public health establishment. “Fools,” she wrote in her journal. “I’m surrounded by knaves and fools.”

  Margaret Mead, 1925

  Even non-medical persons of high achievement in the natural sciences have benefited from an acquaintance with the Guide. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa, owed her friendly relationships with the Samoan natives of 1925 partly to her practice of sharing the wisdom of the Guide with them. She was often seen hiking to the hut of a sick informant to deliver a clay pot of some pungent herbal vitamin tonic. These tonics were based on the recipes in the dog-eared copy of the Guide that was always in her knapsack. The Samoans came to regard this copy as an object numinous with manna, and named it halabanta-nu-pennu, meaning “Good for the Complexion.”

  Nikola Tesla

  The modern age of alternating current was made possible by the dynamos and motors of Hungarian-born inventor Nikola Tesla, 1856 to 1943.18 Tesla was a major celebrity in the New York of the gay nineties. But the private life of this reclusive figure remained mysterious until the 1946 Guide. In this edition, Dr. Michael Cisco—a friend of Dr. Lambshead and a frequent collaborator—described his experiences as Tesla’s personal physician and addiction counselor from 1927 until the master inventor’s death.

  In early manhood Tesla had synthesized a new form of dextroamphetamine sulphate, which he called hyper-dex, and on which he became acutely dependent. Tesla believed that he owed his eidetic design abilities to the drug, and could not be persuaded to abandon it. By 1927 his cardiac health was seriously compromised. The ingenious Dr. Cisco applied his anti-disease theories to Tesla’s case and concocted an anti-hyper-dex, which successfully introduced an anti-addiction into Tesla’s metabolism. This was only the first of a long series of triumphs for anti-disease therapy, of which Dr. Cisco may well be proud, despite the dogged efforts of the mean-spirited eunuchs of the World Health Organization to strip him of his credentials.

  Lon Chaney, 1930

  Since the days of the silent screen, certain Hollywood stars have suffered from secret health problems, some quite extreme. A long unsuspected example of this phenomenon was Lon Chaney Sr. (1883 to 1930), the Man of a Thousand Faces—revered for his performances in “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He died of throat cancer at the peak of his career, following shortly on the release of his first talking picture.19 Or so the medical records claim.

  In her 1984 tell-all article for the Guide, Seattle pet mortician Genette Wangell revealed that her father, Dr. Christian Wangell, the well-known Los Angeles bone specialist, had served as Mr. Chaney’s private physician throughout his film career. What was more startling was the news that Chaney never wore makeup. His so-called makeup effects were simply his face, or rather his skull, since his skull had resorbed his face at the onset of his Metaplasic Exostosis.20 Early diagnosis allowed Dr. Wangell to control and even to sculpt the peculiar skeletal protrusions characteristic of the disease.

  William Beebe

  Between 1930 and 1934 American naturalist/explorer William Beebe and bathyscaphe designer Otis Barton caught humanity’s attention with the descents of “Beebe’s Bathysphere” into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda. One important aspect of these descents was never made public until brought to light in the 1940 Guide.

  It was Beebe’s and Barton’s closely-guarded trade secret that they’d achieved superhuman levels of pressure tolerance by the agency of experimental serum injections. This serum was devised by the notorious Houston zoologist Dr. Terrence Moorcock (great-grandson of the Reverend Michael Moorcock, whose essay appears in this volume). It was pressed from fattened hothouse specimens of the giant Samoan Rat, on which species Dr. Moorcock is acknowledged as the world’s foremost authority. The doctor’s serum system was a new wrinkle on a practice of Samoan pearl divers, who drink the rat’s blood ceremonially.21

  Mildew, 1934

  The 1934 limited edition, a handsome volume printed in Algeria and bound in the finest Moroccan horse hide, was the occasion of a most regrettable incident. All of the contributors, save only for Dr. Lambshead himself, died within weeks of the book’s release. At first, rumors of an Egyptian curse fueled lurid articles in the gutter press.

  But Dr. Lambshead soon got to the bottom of the matter. The Algerian printing firm engaged by John Trimble had used paper infested with a highly poisonous mildew. Consequently, the contributors died horrible menasprotic deaths as they received their complementary copies. Dr. Lambshead was spared by a typographical error in the address list he’d mailed to the printer. His own copies were shipped to a wrong address. The 1935 edition, bound in British calfskin, contained his report on the mold that had cast such a shadow over the previous edition. The report featured illustrative photographs of his autopsy on the body of Dr. Julio Altametti.

  Naturally, a few gutless character-assassins whispered in corners that it was all some twisted experiment gone awry, or that the doctor had planned the whole thing. The notion is nonsensical. The contributors were Dr. Lambshead’s closest friends and colleagues. He was shattered by their deaths. Besides, he hadn’t been to Algeria for months.

  Sigmund Freud

  Austrian neurologist Dr. Sigmund Freud died of cancer in London, 1939. Although his literary style was eloquent, his medical career had been little more than a long chain of plagiarisms. After 1921, his favorite source of material was his complete set of the Guide. In fact, after 1921 all his “analyses” were conducted while the analysands were doped with an Indonesian trance potion, knowledge of which he gleaned from an article by Dr. Lambshead in the first edition.

  There have been several quacks and charlatans who’ve exploited the Guide for personal aggrandizement, or for filthy lucre, or even for revenge. They always seem to come to a bad end somehow. Perhaps Dr. Lambshead has something to do with that. Freud’s cocaine-related jaw cancer for example. Dr. Lambshead seems to know more about it than he’s telling. And didn’t George Gurdjieff die rather suddenly in 1943? Never mind.

  Part Two: THE WAR YEARS, 1939–1945

  Dr. Lambshead returned to England during the years of World War II and practiced at the scene of his internship, Combustipol General Hospital of Devon, which was flooded with wounded soldiers, sailors, and aviators. There he explored many innovative techniques of reconstructive surgery. Some of these, he made public in the Guide. (Others were ripped off by the opportunistic Dr. R.F. Wexler and published as his own work.)

  It has sometimes been idly suggested that Dr. Lambshead overworked himself into a towering addiction to Nikola Tesla’s hyper-dex during this period. On such speculations we make no comment. There is such a thing as respect for privacy after all.

  Stalingrad, 1942

  The secret history of World War II is riddled with concealed rare diseases and concealed countermeasures. At the Battle of Stalingrad, for example, both the German Sixth Army and the Russian forces under Zhukov were plagued by transient toe resorbsions, often misreported by field medics as loss of toes to frostbite.

  The symptoms of stress-related toe resorbsion
were fully elucidated by Dr. Alan Moore in the 1937 Guide. Resultantly, the savvy medical corps of the Bolshevik army was well equipped with a topical ointment of wormwood and radium in cod liver paste. The Reich’s medical corps, by contrast, was forbidden the use of the Guide, which Joseph Goebbels had declared degenerate. Never arriving at a correct diagnosis, they were unable to establish prophylaxis. The resorbsion gap was an important factor in the Soviet Union’s implacable defense against the Wehrmacht siege.

  Albert Hofmann

  While the Russians were defending Stalingrad, the world’s foremost scientists were building new machines. World War II engendered a plethora of new technologies, such as radar, guided missiles, atomic fission, and proto-computers. These advances were based largely on the vision and resolve of such men as Werner Von Braun, Edward Teller, and Alan Turing. What is not common knowledge is the connection of Von Braun, Teller, and Turing with master pharmaceutical chemist Albert Hofmann.

  In 1935, Dr. Hofmann began work at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, where he researched ergotamine derivatives. In 1938, he first synthesized lysergic acid derivative 25, which approximates the serotonin-boosting activity of the tryptamine hallucinogens. All of this is a matter of public record.22 But only readers of Dr. Hofmann’s 1952 article for the Guide are aware of his most important synthesis of 1938—the harmaline/telepathine/isodrene “cocktail” for induced brain acceleration.

  More than just a stimulant, the HTI cocktail can double or even triple the dendritic connections of the frontal cortex. Although Dr. Hofmann has never published the formula, he does admit to providing steady supplies of the cocktail to Edward Teller, father of the A-bomb, to Alan Mathison Turing, father of the computer, and to Werner Von Braun, father of the V-2 rocket. (Some have criticized Dr. Hoffman for offering his concoction to both Axis and Allied Forces scientists. One must keep in mind that Switzerland was a neutral nation.)

  In a 1940 letter to his benefactor, Von Braun wrote, “Eternal thanks for the ampoules. I can now read the mind of any machine I encounter and can bend it to my will. Your drug will revolutionize . . . everything.”

  One further aspect of this matter emerged in the 1953 Guide. Apparently, Werner Heisenberg, director of the Nazi atomic energy project at Hechingen,23 caught wind of the HTI brain accelerant, gathered what data he could, and assigned a pharmacist to counterfeit the drug. The resultant quasi-cocktail was a total failure. It only made Heisenberg absentminded and sleepy.

  Adolf Hitler

  Adolf Hitler was a man of a secretive, even paranoid, temperament. His associates always suspected him of keeping dark personal secrets. He was in fact hiding a secret that would certainly have horrified his eugenics-minded colleagues. It was a secret known only to his doctor, homeopathic steam therapist Karl Ortt, (author of the suppressed cookbook French Cuisine With Codeine and its sequel Mousses With Morphine.) After the Fuehrer’s death, Dr. Ortt provided the Guide with a portrait of the real Adolf Hitler, a man divided by the bizarre secret of his birth.

  It seems there were two of him. They were born to Klara Hitler in Braunau, Austria, 1889. They were a rare case of identical Siamese half twins. Although the two baby boys were conjoined by their common skin, they were issued two birth certificates—one for Adolf on the right and one for Wulf on the left.

  The pediatrician in charge of the maternity ward had noticed some motor anomalies in the boys and decided to radiograph them. Most doctors of this period had never heard of a fluoroscope, but this was no ordinary pediatrician. This was Dr. Elias Mudthumper, Buckhead’s favorite uncle and an early amateur radiologist. (Irradiating things was sort of a hobby with him.) The radiographic plates revealed twin sets of internal organs and a skull bifurcated by a bony partition down the middle.24 Each twin had one leg, one arm, half a torso, and half a head.

  As a child, Adolf contracted mumps, but only years later did Wulf. Often at school, one side of the “boy” would fall asleep while the other side took notes. Yet as adults, wearing their girdle and abdominal truss, their impersonation of a normal human being was uncanny.25 They carried their secret to the grave, but the Guide dug it up again. Further evidence, if any is needed, that only readers of the Guide have access to a true understanding of recent medical history.

  FDR, 1945

  This brings us to the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt (1882 to 1945), who certainly would have lived out the final months of the war if only his attending physicians had consulted the Guide. Roosevelt’s doctors assumed that his declining state of respiratory health was Polio-related. A Guide reader would have recognized the telltale symptoms of Uzbekistani Electric Head Lice. Recently declassified KGB documents verify that this rare electric louse was indeed planted on FDR by agents of Stalin at the Yalta Conference.

  Dr. Lambshead demonstrates how careful airbrushing is essential to lasting protein-bindle deglostropy when endo-integumental attrition exceeds prothemic olpens by more than eight hemicycles. (1932)

  Despite his enduring disdain for “the cult of personality”, Dr. Lambshead allowed this portrait to appear in the 1940 edition of the Guide.

  San Diego, California, 1997. Courageous public health workers investigate an outbreak of Cyanofixative Venereal Yeast. (p.284)

  Nordvik, USSR, 1948. Soviet psychiatric technicians attempt to rehabilitate a victim of Mongolian Mud Constipation (p. 277)

  Part Three: THE COLD WAR YEARS, 1946–1990

  In 1946, London’s Chatto & Windus published the first edition of the Guide to be available to bookstores and a general readership. Articles began to pour in at a great rate. Contributors ranged from nurses in Missouri to GPs in Rhodesian shack towns to Yugoslavian oncologists to “barefoot doctors” practicing in rural China.

  Having honorably discharged his obligations both to Combustipol General Hospital and to the Guide, Dr. Lambshead resumed his frenetic circumnavigations of the globe. Once a year he would return to Britain to supervise the final proofs at Chatto & Windus. Unfortunately, problems with British censorship arose in 1953, requiring the Guide to shift its home base to Penguin Books of New York.

  In 1954—just months before Penguin Books could issue its first volume, already in production—the FBI investigated Dr. Lambshead for communist sympathies. This investigation followed closely on the heels of Dr. Lambshead’s blunt refusal to participate in a certain project dear to the heart of Mr. John Edgar Hoover. The doctor has in his files a letter from Mr. Hoover that suggests the creation of “a disease that is only fatal to pinkos and pansies.” Across the letter, the doctor has scrawled a single word in red laundry pen: “Ridiculous!”

  After the investigation, the State Department refused the doctor further visas for travel in the United States. In reaction he found a new home for the Guide at the Jolly Boy Publishing & Soap Company of Bombay, where it remained securely ensconced through the remainder of the Cold War years.

  Prominent Contributors

  As the Guide made gains in circulation, it began to attract articles penned by eminent public figures. The 1961 Guide proudly featured an article on the intestinal fruit worms of the Congo River basin, written by eminent Alsatian theologian and physician Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875 to 1965). In 1968, Dr. Christiaan Neethling Barnard of South Africa, renowned for his heart transplants, submitted a wonderful paper on some of the more humorous side effects of cyclosporine.

  The Guide’s relationship with other well-known contributors has proceeded less happily. Dr. Sigmund Rascher, inventor of the decompression chamber, published his fascinating 1930s research into Aeronautic Shock Reaction in the Guide. Dr. Fritz Ernst Fischer contributed forward-looking articles on bone transplantation. And then there was Josef Mengele and his intriguing essay on the use of identical human twins in eugenics research.

  After the further studies of these three gentlemen at the Auschwitz concentration camp came to light,26 Dr. Lambshead concluded that he could publish no further submissions from Rascher, Fischer, and Mengele. “Let them call it
censorship,” he wrote in his journal. “Certain things simply aren’t done.”

  The Gulags

  The Guide was the first publication to expose a massive communist deception perpetrated by apparatchiks on an unsuspecting West. This deception concerned the Siberian gulag system. To this day most sovietologists still believe that the gulags were places of exile for dissidents and other targets of Stalin’s displeasure.

  Actually, the gulag system wasn’t created to punish anyone. It was the Soviet government’s response to an inexplicable lemming-like migration of otherwise-sane Russian citizens to the bleak Siberian wastes. Beginning in 1946, masses of these mania-driven souls arrived in Siberia each month. There they would gorge themselves on the rich black frozen mud. Nor would they return to their previous lives. If forcibly removed, they would find ways to return. The government dealt with the problem by constructing ramshackle labor camps, and the rest is history.

  Reportedly, one of the GRU’s translators of Western technical literature came across an explanation for the exodus in the 1944 Guide. What he discovered was Dr. Neil Gaiman’s posthumous exhaustive monograph on Mongolian Mud Constipation, a viral infection that causes an excruciating binding of the large bowel, always co-present with the delusion that only eating the mud of some distant region will relieve the symptoms. Antibiotics allowed many gulag dwellers to return to normal Russian society. Another baffling case history solved with the help of the Guide.

  Pepsi-Cola, 1949

  In the aftermath of World War II, the Coca-Cola Company and its arch rival, the Pepsi-Cola Company, rapidly extended their national bottling systems into global cartels.27 In violence-torn South and Central America, local competition for distribution franchises sometimes lapsed into gangsterism, and rivals for lucrative American cola contracts would not uncommonly turn up dead in a ditch. Even the friction between established Coke distributors and Pepsi distributors was likely to involve rifle sniping or exchanges of pistol fire, especially in the thriving new cities of Brazil. In Bolivia in 1949, Dr. Lambshead himself foiled a heinous product-tampering plot.