The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

by Unknown

  Last year, on reaching the age of 102, Dr. Lambshead decided to pass the Guide’s editorial reins to younger hands. After reviewing dozens of applicants, he selected doctors Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, co-synthesists of many of the standard petroleum-based anti-itching drugs and three-time winners of the University of Mississippi’s Merrick Award For Rapid Relief. Dr. Lambshead will continue to consult and to contribute, but responsibility for the perpetual influx of obscure and discredited submissions will henceforth fall to VanderMeer and Roberts.

  After Boojum Press slid into that sinkhole in the Mojave, the new editors were somewhat at a loss for a publisher. Then the intrepid Night Shade Books of Oregon stepped forward to offer its services. Night Shade Books has won enthusiastic acclaim for its recent ventures into medical publishing. These ventures include handsome reprints of such classics as The Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies edited by John Trimble and Rebecca Manard and The Journals of Sarah Goodman, Disease Psychologist with an introduction by Welsh overspecialization specialist Dr. Rhys Hughes. Six more titles for this series are currently in the planning stages.43

  We applaud Night Shade Books for their commitment to the cutting edge of medicine literature. They have ignored the veiled threats of Dr. R.F. Wexler and likewise the dire warnings of those disturbed individuals who just can’t let go of the 1934 mildew thing. To Night Shade Books we say, “Well done! Fortune favors the brave.”

  As for Dr. Wexler, to him we can only say: “Dear Sir: Kindly send your anthrax-soaked missives elsewhere. And if you want to get serious about contagious letters, then invest in some smallpox like a normal person.”

  This up-to-the-minute edition constitutes a worthy continuation of a proud tradition. Like Dr. Lambshead, the Guide remains vigorous despite its weight of years. The Guide sees clearly, reasons clearly, and speaks common sense in a world of incomprehensible medical jargon. May it continue to thrive for another eighty-three editions.44

  BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

  Dr. Dawn “Aurelia” Andrews, a renowned medical pathologist, and a Knight of the order of the Flaming Lancet, indulges in a calming watercolor or two whilst awaiting corpses to dissect. She is an avid collector of books on vivisection, dissection, and genetic modification, including rare copies of Hustler magazine. She also has an extensive collection of wax anatomical specimens, of both sexes, which she keeps in the basement of her Hampstead home.

  Dr. Steve Aylett began his medical career as a wrestling injury paramedic but was bred for “unnecessary surgery” during matches. The most notorious of these incidents occurred when he removed Chad “Bonecruncher” Murphy’s appendix in the ring during the 1989 re-match against the Red Shadow in Seattle. He claims that shortly after its removal the appendix “burst like a stormcloud,” but him footage of the incident shows him merely tossing the organ into the face of a spectating gran. Burying himself in research, Aylett began seeking evidence to prove that teardrops had a skeletal structure, an account of which was published in his book What Was I Thinking With That? Arrested after several incidents of provoking valuable tears from small children by shouting at them point-blank and suddenly, he stated on the steps of Bow Street Magistrates Court, “Damn right I probe heads!” and started lashing out, despite the fact that he was standing there entirely alone. He established the Benway Medical Centre in London’s Mayfair in order to more successfully draw attention to himself. “There are slimy muscles in my arms,” he says today, “but apparently that’s normal.” Aylett’s other published works of medical note are Toxicology, Slaughtermatic, and Shamanspace.

  Dr. Kage Baker occupied the Chair of Splanchology at the University of California at Bodega Bay from 1948 to 1962. She authored In the Garden Iden, which is now considered the definitive work on splenic dysfunction in the Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops gilli). She also conducted the landmark five-year study of splenic parasites infesting the Pygmy Killer Whale (Feresa attenuata), publishing the results in 17 volumes, collectively titled The Anvil of the World. In 1963 she retired from medicine and took the veil at the New Camaldoli Monastery, over the protest of the brother friars.

  Dr. Nathan Ballingrud served as the Royal Medical Officer in the Kingdom of Norway from 1960 until 1971, when his collaboration with the Nazi occupational government was made public. Exiled from his native country, he relocated to New Orleans, in the United States, where he indulged his fascination with the study of transcendental pathology and routinely kidnapped small children for use in his experiments into the nature of godhood. It was in that city, while visiting the infamous Camouflaged Library in the Ursulines Academy, that he caught a virus that would, sporadically and without warning, trade his consciousness with that of a red dwarf star in Galaxy M-64. These bouts were frequent but happily short-lived, as those in his presence during an attack tended to be reduced to atoms. Ballingrud disappeared in 1978, believed to have been abducted by the Argentinean government. It is probable that he was tortured to death and his body hurled into the briny deep; which is what he deserved.

  Dr. Michael Barry has received accolades worldwide for his groundbreaking anthropological research and Handycam documentaries into sado-masochism among the inhabitants of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. In the absence of an appropriate laboratory, and in defiance of the politically correct Ethics Committees of Australian medical institutions, Dr. Barry uses his own body as a test-bed for sado-masochistic explorations. He selflessly continues his psychobiological research at his laboratory on the premises of Mistress Sasha’s House of Pleasure & Pain. Inquiries should be directed to Mistress Sasha, as Dr. Barry is unable to speak while conducting his experiments.

  Dr. R. M. Berry was, until her disappearance in 1997, director of the Marital Technology Foundation that today bears her name. The results of her collaboration with Drs. Brian Evenson and Remy B. la Pher on Satyriasis are widely known. The publicity attending her discovery of male menopause is considered unfortunate. Dr. Sarah Goodman has called her “the Dwight D. Eisenhower of Marital Psychopharmacology.” It is not true that she experimented on Norman Mailer. Dr. Berry’s treatise The Condom remains the standard work. Investigators recently found hair and nail clippings matching her DNA in Caracas, Venezuela.

  Dr. Michael Bishop specializes in the psychological ailments and ego-related disabilities of artists, particularly writers, using his own dread-inducing experiences as templates for highly questionable psychosomatic deductions and extrapolations. He has published diagnostic haiku, stichomythic interview notes, and Nietzschean treatment proposals in an array of venues, including the Journal of Holistic Hebephrenia, periodic Philip K. Dick Festschrifts, Writers & Angst, and People. For the past nine years, Dr. Bishop has lived in the Carl Jung-Shoshana Feldman Home for Bemazed Belletrists, emerging in moments of shrewd quasi-lucidity to accept awards meant for others. To date, he has acquired a Super Bowl ring, an Emmy, a first-runner-up designation in the Miss America pageant, and an unsupervised psychiatric internship at the Mayo Clinic.

  Dr. K.J. Bishop is recognised worldwide for her contributions to the field of carphology. A prominent lecturer on public health issues, Dr. Bishop is the author of two books, the groundbreaking Diagnosis for Duffers and recent bestseller The Enema Within. Pursuing a lifelong interest in diseases of the rich, in early 2003 she moved her consulting practice offshore to the residential superliner Superbia.

  Dr. Richard Calder, following some difficulties in the New World, started over as an intern at London Hospital, Whitechapel, during much of the 1990s. There he pioneered the emergent fields of morbid prosthetics, hyperpathology, and the still marginalized surgical techniques of Tantric cutterage and phlebotomy. A hugely enthusiastic vivisectionist, he was investigated in 1999 for clandestine membership in the Society for Cruelty to Small Animals. Although the inquiry was suspended without reaching any definite conclusions, he was struck off in 2002 on an unrelated charge of “kitten baiting.” His interest in the genetic basis of sexual hysteria took him to the Middle Ea
st to research the bloodlines of belly dancers awaiting trial for appropriating the intromittent organs of their admirers with miniature power-driven saws. Dr. Calder’s less-than mysterious disappearance while touring the ancient sites of Babylonia during the spring of 2003 has translated him from the sphere of morbid prosthetics into that of morbid aesthetics as readers ponder such tomes as Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things, Cythera, and Frenzetta.

  Dr. Jay Caselberg received his training in Medical Archaeology at the University of Western Broken Hill. His research into billabong pathology on an early field trip led him to an encounter with a wandering Bunyip. The experience so disturbed him that he fled to Southeast Asia to conduct studies on the neuropathology of frogs and toads. His articles have appeared in such diverse medical journals as Frog and Toad, Amphibian Neuropathology, and Spawn.

  Dr. Stepan Chapman received his essential linguistic, zoological, and medical training at the Academy of the Ancient Trilobites deep beneath Antarctica. His doctoral thesis involved the heroic sagas of the polar isopods. Since then his articles in the literature have dealt with such entomological and pathological subjects as Cyanofixative Venereal Yeast, the Zig Zag Bug, and the Musical Goiters of Lapland. Dr. Chapman has since pursued his researches at the Doolittle Oceanographic Institute of Samoa and at the International Institute For Further Study. He currently serves as a consultant and translator for the United Nations Subcommittee on Vertebrate Arthropod Relations. He is also the co-founder and resident manager of the Chapman Wild Insect Preserve at Aphasia Gorge, Arizona. Dr. Chapman has long been a friend to conspiracy theorists everywhere.

  Dr. Michael Cisco, generally dismissed as a quack, and publicly vilified by Dr. Orveo Vitrine as “a self-smoking ham,” has nevertheless sustained a surprisingly long career in the field of speculative medicine, practicing in 15 countries (on one occasion, in three countries in one day) and in international waters. He was the first to develop a methodology for pre-mortem embalming, to diagnose nervous disorders in ghost limbs, and to reintroduce zodiac-interventionist medicine in China. One of Vitamin D’s most vocal opponents, Dr. Cisco is also engaged in an extended study of anti-diseases, which promises to open an entirely new field of medical enterprise to the less easily intimidated breed of researchers. Unfortunately, this study has proved to be more intimate than originally expected, as Dr. Cisco has himself contracted a form of anti-typhoid, and is thereby confined to the unwholesome air of the Parisian sewers, immediately below the Hotel du Tond. Despite recent reverses, he still anticipates a timely recovery.

  Dr. Alan M. Clark, although rumored to have “died while flossing his teeth,” is to date still alive. He has had a long and widely varied, if controversial, career as an illustrator and writer. He is most well known for paintings of the so-called “dead wood” sites of those individuals Dr. Duane Lovesome Backscatter claims have succumbed to Fungal Disenchantment. These paintings, as well as many others Dr. Clark calls “psyche portraits” (though meant to accompany the text of his various medical writings), have instead been used primarily as illustrations for cheap fiction. Indeed, his medical papers, considered laughable by many, have only found acceptance in books of horror fiction.

  Dr. Michael Aloysius Cobley, B.A., F.R.S., S.L.D., B.S.F.A. (Hons), was born to a family of itinerant Orkney jugglers. At the age of eight, he ran away to be brought up by distant relatives in Aberdare. Soon after his graduation from the Cardiff College of Physicians, he found himself appointed Chief Medical Officer of South Uist. His extensive contributions to the letters page of The Lancet brought him to the attention of such surgical luminaries as Williamson, Caselberg, and Di Filippo. Upon his translocation to London, he collaborated with all three on a hypothesis concerning the bloodline transference of different kinds of luck. After an unfortunate incident involving a blind knife-thrower and three generations of Cornish dowsers, Cobley found it necessary to distance himself from his former colleagues. It was a year later when the dark (and subsequently interdicted) events concerning Sir Randal Bullivant took place, and which appear in this august publication for the first time. In later life, Dr. Cobley took great interest in the growth of peculiar orchids. In his autobiography Musings From An Irregular Life, he dealt with the persistent rumors of somnambulant juggling that dogged his autumn years, denying their veracity on pages l, 5,13, 14, 22, 38, 47, 79, 91, 92, and 93.

  Dr. Brendan Connell, a dedicated worshipper of the healing god Asclepius, holds a chair of pathological anatomy at Wurzburg. His public lectures and anatomical demonstrations have brought him a certain quantity of renown, as has the publication of his 14-volume work The Therapeutic Effects of Laitance on the Phosphorescent Births of the Okavango Delta.

  Dr. John Coulthart, has combined careers in the fields of art and medicine despite numerous setbacks and legal problems. He first aroused attention after exhibiting human body parts for the SMEGMA show at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery in 1982. National notoriety came in 1995 with the so-called bile incident when the contents of the installation “100,000 Gall Bladders” burst their container, flooding a Southwark gallery. Recent works have been more successful, particularly “Live Celebrity Autopsies,” staged at the Hayward, London, although its projected weeklong performance was postponed due to a lack of volunteer subjects.

  Dr. G.J. Couzens wrote of Gastric Prelinguistic Syndrome in the 1860s, but little else is known of him. No dates of birth or death can be established. Gary Couzens, reputedly born in 1964, who has made many appearances in print and electronic media since 1991, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Third Alternative, and other periodicals, is rumored to be the same man, the result of successful experimentation by the original Couzens in suspended animation. This rumor, however, is surely apocryphal.

  Dr. Paolo G. Di Filippo, a former Vatican City reporter, conducted the surgery for which he was trained at Shambhala Medical College: the transplantation of third eyes. Instead, his career took him into research, where he has spent the past 20 years cataloging the morphological differences among the intromitters of various disease-carrying insects. His conclusions can be found in such volumes as Fuzzy Dice and Neutrino Drag.

  After being laughed out of Vienna in 1975, the Very Reverend Dr. Cory Doctorow (D. Divinity) founded Doc Doctorow’s All-Snake-Handling Road Show and Disease Emporium. In the course of 40 years of field work, Dr. Doctorow has emerged as one of the world’s leading—if least credible—authorities on imaginary, psychosomatic, hysterical, and erroneous diseases. In 2000, the World Science Fiction Society mysteriously awarded him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the Hugo ceremony, a positively humiliating occurrence compounded by the January 2003 publication of his novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Tor Books, of New York City.

  Dr. L. Timmel Duchamp took her M.D. from Columbia in 1959, but emigrated to Paris with her French husband shortly thereafter. After a violent if abortive fliration with psychoanalysis, she studied with the brilliant Michel Foucault, under whose direction she developed her arresting approach to medical history. Dr. Duchamp, known to have used five distinct pseudonyms, denies she intended to generate the impression that her controversial approach was shared by several scholars. She has promised to divulge the true reason for her use of pseudonyms on her deathbed—provided her penchant for sky-diving does not pre-empt the possibility.

  Dr. Rikki Ducornet has spent much of her long and varied medical career cataloguing no less than 2,350 diseases or conditions of the head. Her research has taken her from the wilds of East Anglia to the relative civilization to be found in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Her incisive illustrations accompanying all 2,350 head diseases or conditions have been exhibited in most major medical galleries in the world. Dr. Ducornet’s falling out with Dr. Lambshead in 1985 over the causes of Head Disease No. 2,143 are too esoteric to address in a biographical note. Dr. Ducornet currently divides her time between Prague, Czechoslovakia, and the hinterlands of Patagonia.

  Long
employed as a medical researcher in the balmy climes of Micronesia, Dr. Brian Evenson (1923–1966 [death never confirmed]) suddenly deserted his post as chief medical researcher on the island of Pohnpei, ostensibly to pursue further research. He left behind only a note stating “Gone to Arctic. Am taking cousin Kiteley along. Best wishes, Kline,” a note particularly puzzling in that Evenson is known to have no cousin named “Kiteley” and no association with the name “Kline.” He left behind several medical texts of limited interest, most famously Altmann’s Tongue (a longish treatise on diseases of the mouth), Contagion (which insists on contagiousness being a result of personality flaws), and a case study of Dr. Daniel Schreber, The Din of Celestial Birds.

  Dr. Eliot Fintushel, S.P.Q.R., A.S.A.P., D.O.A., is a senior assistant to the volunteer copyboy’s intern at the Journal of Cuticular Malformations and Aberrations of the Knuckle. He divides his time between the old city of Cuenca in Spain and the 59th Street Y in Manhattan. He is not related to the Nebula Award nominee and two-time NEA Fellow Eliot Fintushel whose current solo performance piece, Apocalypse, will be appearing soon in a theater near you.

  Dr. J. Ephram Ford, of the Long Island Fords, was, in youth, labeled an idiot savant for his dull affect and copious drooling coupled with the amazing ability to communicate with the family dog, St. George. At any moment of the day, with no more than a few quiet barks and a growl he could elicit from the pet what was on its mind. In addition to relaying to his parents the creature’s mundane desires, he was also able to elicit from it the fact that in a previous life it had been a cowboy named Handsome John. Ford lost the appellation of savant upon the dog’s demise, but occasionally channeled its spirit and was given to brief bouts in which he would roll on his back and whimper while spasmodically kicking his right leg. His medical degree was awarded him by the University of Bayonne, from which he graduated with top honors from its correspondence course in General Surgery. Dr. Ford was lionized as something of a saint himself for treating disorders of the mind through corrective surgery performed with what he termed his “scalpel of terrible consequence,” a plastic knife wrapped in aluminum foil and fitted with jiggling doll eyes glued to either side of the blade. Using this instrument of his invention, he would slice the air a hundred or so times only inches in front of the patient’s face as a means of metaphysically excising those defective thoughts troubling the afflicted. After curing the daughter of a millionaire from her condition of agitated sexual melancholy, he was awarded a large sum of money, which he used to retire from the medical profession and study anomalous diseases. Near the end of his career, he became interested in diseases that did not exist but by his account should have. By bringing a particular affliction to light, Retrograde Concoctivitis, he contracted it and due to its resultant mania took on the character of the cowboy, Handsome John. Soon after, he was arrested in a local park near his home in Elisabeth, New Jersey, for lassoing neighborhood dogs. Thereafter, he was sent to an asylum where he lived out the rest of his days in a cell, making watercolor paintings of the old West.