The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases Read online

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  THE THACKERY T. LAMBSHEAD POCKET GUIDE TO ECCENTRIC & DISCREDITED DISEASES

  83RD EDITION

  Editors

  DRS. JEFF VANDERMEER & MARK ROBERTS

  Designer & Creative Consultant

  DR. JOHN COULTHART

  Medical Consultant

  DR. MARK SHAMIS

  Infection Proofreaders

  DRS. ANN KENNEDY, NEIL WILLIAMSON, SCOTT STRATTON, TAMAR YELLIN

  Medical Agent

  DR. HOWARD MORHAIM

  Patron Saint of Disease

  DR. ALLEN RUCH

  (AND HIS “MAD QUAIL DISEASE”)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Contributor List

  The Life of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead

  An Enthusiastic Foreword by the Editors

  A Reluctant Introduction by Thackery T. Lambshead

  Alphabetes

  BALLISTIC ORGAN SYNDROME

  BLOODFLOWER’S MELANCHOLIA

  BONE LEPROSY

  BUBOPARAZYGOSIA

  BUFONIDIC CEPHALITIS

  BUSCARD’S MURRAIN

  CATAMENIA HYSTERICA

  CEÒLMHAR BUS

  CHRONIC ZYGOTIC DERMIS DISORDER

  CHRONO-UNIFIC DEFICIENCY SYNDROME

  CLEAR RICE SICKNESS

  DENEGARE SPASTICUS

  DELUSIONS OF UNIVERSAL GRANDEUR

  DI FORZA VIRUS SYNDROME

  DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP

  DOWNLOAD SYNDROME

  EBERCITAS

  EMORDNY’S SYNDROME

  EMPATHETIC FALLACY SYNDROME

  ESPECTARE NECROSIS

  EXTREME EXOSTOSIS

  FEMALE HYPER-ORGASMIC EPILEPSY

  FERROBACTERIAL ACCRETION SYNDROME

  FIGURATIVE SYNESTHESIA

  FLORA METAMORPHOSIS SYNDROME

  FRUITING BODY SYNDROME

  FUNGAL DISENCHANTMENT

  FUSELI’S DISEASE

  HSING’S SPONTANEOUS SELF-FLAYING SARCOMA

  INTERNALIZED TATTOOING DISEASE

  INVERTED DROWNING SYNDROME

  JUMPING MONKWORM

  LEDRU’S DISEASE

  LOGOPETRIA

  LOGROLLING EPHESUS

  MENARD’S DISEASE

  MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM INFESTATION

  MONOCHROMITIS

  MOTILE SNARCOMA

  NOUMENAL FLUKE

  OUROBOREAN LORDOSIS

  PATHOLOGICAL INSTRUMENTATION DISORDER

  PENTZLER’S LUBRICIOUSNESS

  POETIC LASSITUDE

  POST-TRAUMATIC PLACEBOSIS

  POSTAL CARRIERS’ BRAIN FLUKE SYNDROME

  PRINTER’S EVIL

  RASHID’S SYNDROME

  RAZORNAIL BONE ROT

  REVERSE PINOCCHIO SYNDROME

  THIRD EYE INFECTION

  TIAN SHAN-GOBI ASSIMILATION

  TURBOT’S SYNDROME

  TWENTIETH CENTURY CHRONOSHOCK

  VESTIGIAL ELONGATION OF THE CAUDAL VERTEBRAE

  WIFE BLINDNESS

  WORSLEY’S SUPPLEMENT

  THE WUHAN FLU

  ZSCHOKKE’S CHANCRES

  Reminiscences

  1923: Dr. Michael Cisco

  1948: Dr.Jeffrey Thomas

  1961: Dr. Xue-Chu Wang (as related to Dr. Eric Schaller)

  1965– ?: Dr. Rachel Pollack

  1975: Dr. Queenie Bishop

  1983: Dr. Stepan Chapman

  2002: Dr. Richard Calder

  2003: Dr. R.F. Wexler

  Autopsy–Examples from prior editions

  Gastric Pre-linguistic Syndrome

  Burmese Dirigible Disease

  Tuning’s Spasm

  Various Head Diseases

  MacCreech’s Dementia

  The Malady of Ghostly Cities

  Samoan Giant Rat Bite Fever

  The Putti

  The Obscure Medical History of the Twentieth Century as Revealed by The Lambshead Pocket Glide

  Biographical Data

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for the book

  Copyright page

  INTRODUCTION

  HOW I BECAME ONE OF DR. LAMBSHEAD’S MEDICAL ASSISTANTS FOR THREE YEARS: The Sordid Story Behind The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts (Night Shade Books)

  First published by BookSense, 2005

  ‘Mentioned in whispers for decades; burned in Manchuria; worshipped in Peru; the only book to be listed on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum twice, for emphasis; available again at last, in this definitive edition. Welcome to the Lambshead Guide. Disease-mongers, shudder.’

  Dr. China Miéville

  When people ask me ‘Jeff, how did you come up with the crazy idea for a fake disease guide?’ I always tell them two people are to blame: Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead and, perhaps more importantly, Alan Ruch, creator of The Modern Word website.

  Alan’s email moniker is ‘The Great Quail.’ One day towards the end of 2000, the Great Quail happened to include a P.S. that read ‘I think I have contracted Mad Quail Disease.’

  Mad Quail Disease. Suddenly, the image of a chapbook of odd fictional diseases materialized in my brain.

  ‘No,’ I told myself. ‘That’s just too weird.’

  A week later, the image hadn’t faded – it had, if anything, gained strength and legitimacy.

  Soon, I had a nascent publisher and co-editor in Mark Robert and his London-based Chimeric Creative Group. The idea at the time was a short collection of diseases, but a funny thing happened on the way to publication. What was supposed to be a little chapbook of fake diseases slowly but surely, over a period of three years, turned into a 320-page medical monstrosity, complete with footnotes, fake history, reminiscences, and over 70 illustrations.

  How did it happen?

  We had created a monster in the persona of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, an octogenarian physician, now retired to Wimpering-on-the-Brink, who had spent his life traveling the globe in search of the most unusual diseases known to humankind.

  And then, most unwisely, we gave him a medical guide, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (now in its 83rd edition). The Guide had a long and glorious history long before we had any diseases to populate it with.

  But perhaps the worst thing Mark and I did was to send out the guidelines to about a dozen writers, hoping that at best maybe half would respond with a submission. Perhaps we shouldn’t have stressed the ‘fun’ part of the
project, because we received submissions from everyone we had solicited work from, some of which we had to reject. And not only did we receive submissions, but the writers involved suggested other writers to invite . . . and invite begat invite begat invite . . . until it became clear we had a small book on our hands, not a chapbook at all.

  ‘It really was an organic type of thing, a sort of email-spread meme,’ Mark recalls.

  By this time, we had great work in hand from Michael Moorcock, Kage Baker, Liz Williams, Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, China Miéville, Alan Moore, and many others. We had also solicited reminiscences from writers of their doctor personas working with Dr. Lambshead in the field. Stepan Chapman, a Philip K. Dick Award winner whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, not only contributed a reminiscence – he wrote us a secret history of the twentieth century as seen from the perspective of the Guide.

  Night Shade Books, an independent US publisher bought the hardcover rights, giving us a wider audience. Later, of course, Pan Macmillan would buy the rights, along with Bantam in the United States, which meant our quirky little idea would have a worldwide audience.

  Clearly, our little book had become a Big Book. But not only had it become a Big Book, it had become a Real Medical Guide – in terms of the amount of work required to edit it.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of the prep work required,’ Mark wrote to me via email during the midst of the worst of it. ‘It’s madness!’

  We had to deal with issues of medical authenticity (for which we relied on family physician Mark Shamis, who lives here in Tallahassee, Florida), standardization of references in each of the 65 contributors’ entries, addition of cross-references, several layers of copy-editing, and much else. Late at night, going through the text yet one more time, I began to lament that after the project was over, I’d have put in as much work as if I’d co-edited a real medical guide, but still not have the credentials to edit a real one!

  Yet even then, we weren’t finished. John Coulthart had agreed to do the design of the book. John is one of the world’s best book designers, his work for Savoy legendary. He’s a very visual designer who, when necessary, will combine elements of graphic novel design into his books. We thought he’d be ideal to add illustrations, fake covers of prior editions, and anything else we’d need to make the Guide authentic.

  So it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that the first email John sent to us once he started on the project was ‘I’m determined to find or create an illustration for every disease in the book.’ Mark and I had thought that there might be a few illustrations, but had no idea that John would become as obsessed with the Guide on the graphic side as we had on the editorial side.

  Soon John was sending us pages with ‘bloodstains’ greyscaled over the page numbers, a number of mockup pages of disease entries with wonderful accompanying illustrations, a table of contents that looked like a medical chart, and a series of stunning fake covers. Not only was he creating an amazing look and feel for the book, he went ahead and wrote his own disease, ‘Printer’s Evil,’ which is one of the highlights of the book.

  ‘The challenges of working on the disease guide were myriad,’ John would say later. ‘Not least of which was working on fleshing out my own ideas while incorporating yours and Mark’s.’

  I can’t say it wasn’t without strife. There were a lot of late nights emailing back and forth. I wouldn’t call it an argument – more that both editors and the designer loved the project so much that over time the project changed yet again, metamorphosing through the graphic element, the captions to photos and book covers, into something even better than it had been before. My wife, Ann, a Hugo Award-winning editor in her own right, pitched in and did a rather remarkable amount of work on the book as well.

  The moment I knew I personally had gone around the bend on the project, succumbing to what Neil Gaiman calls ‘Diseasemaker’s Croup,’ occurred on what we all call ‘The Borges Entry.’ A New Orleans writer, Nathan Ballingrud, had created a disease called ‘The Malady of Ghostly Cities’ that didn’t fit the rest of the Guide. In this disease, people turn into whole cities in barren, remote locales, their essence contained in libraries in the heart of the cities. The entry was so good that we had to find a way to include it. So we decided that Dr. Lambshead had met Borges during his travels, and influenced Borges to produce a little-known book of metaphysical diseases, only available in an Argentine version, in Spanish.

  One night, well into pre-production, I realized, with a certainty that bordered on madness, that we needed not only the English translation from the Spanish, but the original Spanish version as well. I quickly sent out an email to John and Mark, who, to their credit, took it in stride, and soon we’d convinced our friend Gabriel Mesa, a Spanish-speaking lawyer in New York City, to go along with it all without asking ‘Are you all crazy?’ Within a few weeks, we had the ‘original’ Spanish version of Ballingrud’s disease. We also had John’s incredibly creative covers of the Argentine edition, and a subsequent cheap English-language paperback of The Book of Metaphysical Diseases that mysteriously had not included Dr. Ballingrud’s contribution.

  Meanwhile, new text had to be created every so often to replace old captions or to make the whole concept more plausible. Sometimes it was a bio note for Lambshead himself – who Mark and I were too close to for us to write it ourselves – and sometimes it was a bit of introductory text for a disease from the ‘Autopsy’ section (examples from prior editions). In such cases, we bounced ideas off of Stepan and John, and also brought in Michael Cisco, a New York City-based writer who specializes in bizarre Burroughs-meets-Beckett work.

  Slowly, the Guide took shape. After more than four months of pre-production, the Beast, as I think we had all come to call it, was ready to be sent to the printer for production of bound galleys. Of course, at this point, the fear set in. Looking over the finalized layout, with titles of diseases like ‘Motile Snarcoma,’ ‘Extreme Exostosis,’ and ‘Bone Leprosy,’ I think both Mark and I thought, ‘Oh my god – we’ve just sent a 320-page book to press that may be the weirdest anthology ever produced in the history of English literature!’

  Was it all commercial suicide? Was it the biggest folly since the French built a palace in the shape of a huge elephant?

  Luckily, that has not turned out to be the case. We waited on pins and needles for the initial pre-pub reviews, and were rewarded with some glowing notices:

  Publishers Weekly: ‘An often amazing book. Sure to delight the discerning reader!’

  The Complete Review: ‘A lot of care has been put into this volume, and it is a fun book to make one’s way through. Fun and cleverness can be found at every turn. Enjoyable!’

  San Francisco Bay Guardian: ‘This anthology is so demented and funny it must be read to be believed!’

  From there, the book caught fire, with notices in The Village Voice and the Guardian. Foreign language editions were published in Greece and Portugal, among others. A second Lambshead volume was also eventually published, this time focusing on his cabinet of curiosities.

  Lest anyone think the Guide makes fun of the ill, I should point out that several of the diseases in the Guide are serious, for balance, and because we are sensitive to the issue. We’ve been very happy to see the great reaction from medical personnel, too, for whom a book like this is a welcome relief from daily stress. In fact, it’s been taught at medical colleges for just that purpose – and filed in libraries alongside real medical guides. The anthology was even reviewed in The Lancet.

  The success of the project, though, has been due to, as Mark puts it, ‘taking it seriously’. Without our totally committing to the idea of the personage of Dr. Lambshead, the funny bits wouldn’t be quite as funny.’

  Sometimes people ask me why we did this anthology. The answer, really, is because it’s imaginative and it involves an advance sense of play. Because we think it will delight readers, and make them think at the same time.

  Beside
s, Dr. Lambshead made us do it.

  Jeff VanderMeer, Tallahassee, 2005 and spring 2014 (revised)

  CONTRIBUTORS TO THE 83RD EDITION

  ANDREWS, DAWN here, here, here

  AYLETT, STEVE here

  BAKER, KAGE here

  BALLINGRUD, NATHAN here

  BARRY, MICHAEL here, here

  BERRY, R.M. here

  BISHOP, K.J. here

  BISHOP, MICHAEL here

  CALDER, RICHARD here, here

  CASELBERG, JAY here

  CHAPMAN, STEPAN here, here, here, here, here, here

  CISCO, MICHAEL here, here, here, here, here, here

  CLARK, ALAN M. here, here

  COBLEY, MICHAEL here

  CONNEL, BRENDAN here

  COULTHART, JOHN here

  COUZENS, GARY here

  DI FILIPPO, PAOLO G. here

  DOCTOROW, CORY here

  DUCHAMP, L. TIMMEL here, here, here

  DUCORNET, RIKKI here

  EVENSON, BRIAN here

  FINTUSHEL, ELLIOT here

  FORD, JEFFREY here, here

  GAIMAN, NEIL here

  GWENLLIAN JONES, SARA here

  HUGHES, RHYS here, here

  JACKSON, SHELLEY here, here

  JACOBS, HARVEY here

  KLEFFEL, FREDERICK JOHN here, here

  LAKE, JAY here

  LAMBSHEAD, THACKERY T. here

  LANGFORD, DAVID here

  LEBBON, TIM here

  MESA, GABRIEL here

  MIÉVILLE, CHINA here

  MOORCOCK, MICHAEL here

  MOORE, ALAN here

  NEWELL, MARTIN here

  O’DRISCOLL, MIKE here

  OLSEN, LANCE here

  POLLACK, RACHEL here, here

  REDWOOD, STEVE here

  ROBERTS, MARK here, here

  ROWAN, IAIN here, here

  SCHALLER, ERIC G. here, here

  SLAY JR., JACK here

  STABLEFORD, BRIAN here

  TEM, STEVE RASNIC here, here

  THOMAS, JEFFREY here, here, here

  TOPHAM, JEFF here

  VANDERMEER, JEFF here, here

  WEXLER, R.F. here

  WILLIAMS, LIZ here

  WILLIAMSON, NEIL here