The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
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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