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

  And what is the physician’s role in all of this? Physicians encounter death on a daily basis—is it too bold to suggest that of all the members of our society it is the doctors’ optimism which is the most compromised? If Espectare progresses at its current rate, is my own profound pessimism concerning our ability to heal in turn seriously compromising my patients’ health? Am I, in fact, killing my patients one disappointment, one bad day, one moment of professional despair at a time?

  It is these thoughts that have recently brought me to my decision to leave the medical profession. I plan to spend my days with my children and grandchildren, attempting to enjoy whatever time I, and they, have left.

  I leave the practice of medicine to you gentlemen and ladies who have more hope than I am able to muster.

  Submitted by

  DR. STEVE RASNIC TEM, GRAND FELLOW OF THE COLLEGE OF ACUTE MELANCHOLIA, UNIVERSITY OF THE BIG MUDDY, VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI

  Cross References

  Diseasemaker’s Croup; Post-Traumatic Placebosis

  EXTREME EXOSTOSIS

  Country of Origin

  United States

  First Known Case

  While Exostosis—a form of benign bone tumor—has been widely reported for many years (see Erichsen, Barwell, Hartmann, Mudthumper), the remarkable case reported here for the first time comes to us from the recently-discovered case files of Dr. Karl Ausenheimer. Dr. Ausenheimer served as the sole town physician of Eastborough, Massachusetts, at the time of the events (1906).

  Ausenheimer’s patient was one William Gould, a carpenter who first came to the doctor with an already prominent outgrowth of bone jutting from his right femur. Ausenheimer determined that the man was not at risk and suggested to Gould that a surgeon might saw away the growth, a course of action Gould did not pursue. Ausenheimer noted at the time that he doubted Gould’s claim of the tumor having grown to the length he witnessed in the space of a mere week. While he suspected the growth was an exostosis at that initial examination, he knew that exostoses originate in childhood and tend toward symmetry, though there was not a corresponding tumor on the left femur. Ausenheimer also makes known to us that Gould was a sullen man, prone toward depression, who after his wife left him fired a revolver against his temple. The bullet, however, was deflected by the skull, traveling under the skin to exit at the man’s forehead. Gould was knocked unconscious by the concussion but seemed to exhibit no further complications as a result of the wound. Toward the end of his account, however, the good doctor self-consciously wonders whether this traumatic incident might have overstimulated a portion of the victim’s brain, sending forth confused commands to the diligent troops below.

  Symptoms

  When a barn that Gould was repairing for a local family sat untended for a number of weeks, his brother was called upon to seek Gould at his abode. It was assumed by the townsfolk, and especially the brother, that Gould had successfully ended his own life this time. Instead, what Edwin Gould discovered sent him running from the house and straight into the town’s center, bursting into Ausenheimer’s office. As a result, and upon venturing into Gould’s house, the doctor was stunned to witness his patient immobilized and near dehydration in his badly-soiled bed, unable to rise due to the weight and the awkwardness of the bone tumors that had formed over the past few weeks. These were so prodigious as to have actually broken the skin (mostly without loss of blood), extending out from the limbs, chest, and even brow like branching antlers, the greatest of these growths measuring two feet in length. Over the course of the next several days, the bone tumors continued to grow at an even more remarkable rate. Having sawed off one of these shockingly numerous exostoses from the patient’s shoulder, Ausenheimer found it to be cancellous (containing a reticulated latticework) within but externally quite durable. While their spongy, cell-like interiors kept the individual growths from being overly heavy, their sheer number and size overwhelmed the slender 30-year-old patient.

  History

  Feeling that a case this unusual should be witnessed and dealt with by more worldly surgeons than himself, Ausenheimer decided not to try sawing off the many tumors, other than a few of the heavier ones and the one sprouting from Gould’s skull like a forked horn, just at the bridge of his nose. In any case, the elderly physician found the sawing tough work. He, Edwin Gould, and his wife Eva made the patient as comfortable as possible, feeding him to keep his strength up while Ausenheimer began arrangements for the patient to be moved to the Boston University Clinic for the Anomalous. But upon the second day of visiting his patient’s home, called there by a hysterical Eva Gould, Ausenheimer found the man’s condition to have worsened to an uncanny degree. The growths had multiplied and extended to such an extent that they radiated from the bed in a kind of forest, even digging into the plaster of the ceiling. Ausenheimer marveled that none of these bony spears had punctured Gould’s own body, the way a ram’s horns can grow into its own skull. But by now, understandably, Gould was in a positive panic, and took out most of his delirium upon his poor sister-in-law (some of his abuse suggested to Ausenheimer that William had been in love with Eva, but she had chosen the other brother; in any case, he soon forbade her from reentering his room, and she tearfully exited the house altogether). Ausenheimer could not even approach the patient closer than four feet, and he and Edwin were at a loss as to how to get food and drink to the man through this interlocking fortress of bone, as the patient himself could not lift a limb an inch from the bed. At last they were able to get water and broth to his lips through a long metal tube inserted between the twisted branches. Ausenheimer measured several of these by the hour to track their terrifying progress. He sent word to have surgeons from the clinic in Boston come out to Eastborough as quickly as they could manage.

  Ausenheimer and Edwin spent the night downstairs in the parlor of William’s house. They both reported hearing him rage feverishly at several points during the night, telling them to get out of his house, to leave him in peace, to lock the windows first and the door after them. But when the men roused in the morning, it was to an eerie stillness, and when they ascended to William’s room, it was to find that antlers of bone had pushed the door ajar and even pierced through its wood. When the door was freed and opened, the men found the room beyond it to be utterly blocked to them and filled to its four walls and ceiling with a tightly woven nest of bone. Though the patient and indeed even the bed were not to be seen through the mass, they assumed correctly that Gould had been crushed under the weight. Blood pooled on the floor indicated that at last the tumors had worked their way through his tissues and organs as well. Two days later, when a team of men had finally cleared away enough bone for the body to be examined, it was found to be horribly gored, distorted, broken, with tumors having sprouted even from the jaw, cheekbones, and the very eye sockets of the patient.

  Cures

  Under normal circumstances, exostoses present no serious dangers to their victims. It would seem that only a larger team of surgeons more experienced than Ausenheimer and his helpers might have worked quickly enough to free Gould from the cell of his own making, though it cannot be known whether the tumors would have simply returned. Ausenheimer opines, and one cannot help but agree, that some part of the carpenter William Gould was bent on constructing a means of his own demise.

  Submitted by

  DR. JEFFREY THOMAS

  Cross References

  Bone Leprosy; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Razornail Bone Rot

  FEMALE HYPER-ORGASMIC EPILEPSY

  Black Orgasm

  Country of Origin

  Austro-Hungary

  First Known Case

  Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria notably contains a few paragraphs that suggest a manifestation of the disease many years before it became officially recognized. “Maria X” was, at the time of her death, a 17-year-old milliner’s assistant. Witnesses later described how, while waiting for a tram along Vienna’s Ringstrasse, she suddenly fastened her eyes upon one of
the anonymous clerks who shared the queue, cried out “Oh God, it’s him! My demon lover from the other side of the universe! I am going home! I am going home!” and thereon succumbed to a particularly ferocious and, it transpired, fatal grand mal. In 1919 Freud wrote to Lou-Andreas Salomé: “I put it to you that in a society where non-neurotic women are perceived to be second class citizens, almost a ‘second sex,’ then hysteria may represent a means of escape into a saner world.” The fact that “Black Orgasm” (to employ the demotic appellative) has nothing to do with hysteria, and that the escape it offers may lead to an alien world no saner than our own, does not disqualify the prescience of Freud’s observation, considering that a pathology was not established until the mid 1980s, when WHO, NASA, and the SETI Institute first published their joint findings.

  History

  Medical literature, post-Freud, records several isolated occurrences, the most famous being the case of Jean Harlow whose “cerebral edema” at 26 was undoubtedly a fiction that owed everything to Hollywood spin and prudishness, and nothing to the truth; but it was not until the 1960s, when Black Orgasm became firmly established (if still woefully misunderstood) among the populations of Europe and the United States, that science began to address its spread with appropriate rigor. Public consciousness of the epidemic was raised significantly at this time by the deaths of several minor personalities in the entertainment industry. In the chapter of his autobiography entitled “Veni, Vedi, Vita,” Marcello Mastroianni describes how the young Italian starlet Giulietta Gabon succumbed during the filming of the orgy scene at the end of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita:

  Giulietta had just happened to glance at one of the extras—a man in his late forties, and not in any way handsome—when she gave what seemed a short, involuntary scream, fell to the floor, and, as loss of consciousness set in, was gripped by muscular contractions that we all associated with normal epilepsy. So violent were these contractions, however, that soon no contortionist, however fantastic, would have been able to match them. At one point, her back arched to such a degree that her body seemed to describe a complete circle (a condition otherwise known as Opisthotonos). Her convulsions became more violent still, and as her head thrashed to and fro there was another scream—longer, purer, and more terrible than any that had gone before—followed by a brittle detonation, once, twice, which, as we later learnt from the newspapers, signaled that her spine and neck had snapped under the stress.

  Of course, such things have become so common that they are now seldom reported, in the newspapers or anywhere else. The disease has become entrenched within the fabric of modern life, its prognosis like a psychic scream emanating from countless billboards, magazine covers, television screens, and fashion houses.

  Symptoms

  Seizure may be preceded by irritability, night sweats, a tendency to forever cross and re-cross the legs when seated in public places, obsessive licking of the lips, and, for some, an overriding urge to collect vintage bubblegum cards featuring “Mars Invades!” scenarios of abduction and enslavement. Autopsy reports, however, when combined with testimonials from the victim’s family and friends, suggest that the majority of cases are asymptomatic until the few minutes, or even seconds, preceding the invariably fatal seizure.

  Cures

  Anticonvulsant drugs, such as diphenylhydantoin, phenobarbital, and valproic acid, have proved ineffectual, though not as counterproductive as early attempts to isolate the individual in a nunnery or some other place of religious confinement (where religio-sexual mania, of the kind experienced and described by Saint Teresa of Avila, actually hastened demise). Other research has concentrated on the fact that males are not affected. Dr. Geraldine Carter, for instance, suggests, in The Guide to Psycho-tropic Balkan Diseases, that Dr. Jeffrey Ford’s work on Ouroborean Lordosis may provide a breakthrough if it can only be established how Harmon Creets survived so long with such radical curvature of the spine—the cause of death in 92 per cent of Black Orgasm cases. The most important findings, however, have been in the field of behavioral medicine. Strictly controlled laboratory tests on hundreds of young women manifesting precursive symptoms have indicated that something as insignificant as a photograph, an idle thought while daydreaming, a chance encounter, can prove devastating—but only if the subject has previously complained of liminal hallucinations involving beings that they characterize as “sex demons from another galaxy.” The seriousness with which these hallucinations, or visions, have been evaluated—not by doctors, but by astronomers and physicists—could well mean that government funding for a cure will soon be at an end. NASA and SETI have already theorized that Black Orgasm precipitates something similar to the “orgasm-death gimmick” found in the writings of William S. Burroughs, whereby the dying victim’s ego is transferred to an alien “receptacle” perhaps many light years distant. The promise of interstellar travel will undoubtedly mean that transnational post-radical feminist lobbying groups, such as The Illuminates of Thanateros, which have recently begun campaigning for global sex-death and a return to what they avow to be their home in the stars, may succeed in persuading world populations to embrace the disease and, similarly, that NASA, ESA, and other space agencies, should cede their efforts and resources to a new breed of suicidal astronaut.

  Submitted by

  DR. RICHARD CALDER

  Cross References

  Catamenia Hysterica; Di Forza Virus Syndrome; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Ouroborean Lordosis; Pentzler’s Lubriciousness

  FERROBACTERIAL ACCRETION SYNDROME

  Sometimes Popularly Known—Inaccurately—as “Tin-Itis” or “Metal Fatigue”

  Country of Origin

  Variants of the disease can be found in all places where ores containing iron or tin have been extracted for many generations.

  First Known Case

  Although there are many suggestive autopsy reports from the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the earliest fully-documented case is the (slightly atypical) one of Ivor Polperro, a Cornish tin-miner whose family had followed that profession for at least 200 years. The case was monitored by Dr. Trelawny of Truro between 1898 and 1905 (Dr. Trelawny was one of the earliest medical researchers to employ the Roentgen device, without which the progress of the disease could not be monitored in a living individual).

  Symptoms

  Chronic tiredness; congestion of the chest cavity or lower abdomen; abnormal sensitivity to magnets. In extreme cases, sufferers may be subject to new appetites that lead them to swallow pins, needles, crushed tin cans, items of jewelry and miscellaneous scrap derived from discarded cars, washing machines, refrigerators, and nuclear warheads.

  History

  The tendency of miners dealing with iron ores to have the symptoms listed above was well-known, if only at an anecdotal level, long before the invention of the Roentgen device or “X-ray machine” enabled doctors to confirm and track the build-up of distinct metallic deposits in the bodies of sufferers. Ferrobacteria and other metal-extracting bacteria are not usually to be found among the resident bacterial populations of human beings, but mines provide unusually hospitable conditions for such infections to occur, and the high levels of metals routinely ingested by miners provide a selective context in which such bacteria may thrive at the expense of more familiar commensals. Members of mining families may, over the course of several generations, acquire an astonishing tolerance to the presence and activity of bacterial populations of this kind. It is possible that metal-extracting bacteria may provide a temporarily useful service in removing iron, tin, and other metals from the blood-vessels and alimentary canals of their hosts, but they cannot be regarded as true symbiotes because the subsequent deposits do not remain harmless indefinitely, especially when proximal to the heart or enclosing parts of the intestine (thus inhibiting peristalsis).

  The accretions laid down by the bacteria always contain iron, but it is usually alloyed with at least one other metal, including (in decreasing order of likelihood) tin, copper, silver, gold, and uranium. C
ontrary to rumor and urban legend, no case has ever been found in which the accretion mass was pure gold, let alone one in which the heart was thus encased. On the other hand, there does seem to be a good deal of substance in the suggestion that the shapes assumed by the accretions are by no means random. Those cases which are sufficiently acute to cultivate metal-hunger in the victim, almost amounting to addiction, provide the most telling evidence of the psychosomatic component of the malady; cases have been described in which accretion masses fed by calculated ingestion grow into circles, figures-of-eight, Moebius strips, corkscrews, caltrops, loops of barbed wire, knuckledusters, drill-bits, clamps, and vices—and even, in one notorious instance, a double-barreled flintlock pistol.

  The disease is, alas, far too gradual in its development to be of any use as a mode of industrial craftsmanship, although it is nowadays not uncommon for the worst-afflicted patients to become ambitious to grow hacksaws or eternity rings (perhaps according to the state of their marriages), and one current English sufferer subject to the not-uncommon delusion that he is a reincarnation of King Arthur, has sworn to “cough up Excalibur or die trying.” The latter is the likelier eventuality.

  Treatment

  Modest accretions can nowadays be removed easily enough by surgery, and more complicated ones only require a little more care, but the only patients likely to demand such alleviation are those whose accretions are ugly and inchoate. Almost everyone who can see possibilities for “psychosomatic sculpture”—even when no such possibility is obvious to other observers—prefers to nurture the disease, even in cases where eventual damage to other tissues seems highly likely.