The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases Page 5
BUFONIDIC CEPHALITIS
Toad Brain, Toad Stone, Warty Encephalitis
Country of Origin
China; Southern Mediterranean
First Known Case
The original reports of this and the related disease family have their origin in travelers’ tales from the Far East in the early fifteenth century. The first known verifiable documented case comes from the early eighteenth century with the case of Giacomo Pertrude, a Florentine spice trader reputed to have caught the disease from a carrier traveling the Silk Route overland from China. The case is portrayed in the painting “Man with Toad Brain” by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo hanging in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Later cases have been variously documented in Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalise, The Journal of Neurosurgery, and Doctor Buckhead Mudthumper’s Encyclopedia of Forgotten Oriental Diseases.
Symptoms
The subject suffers from blinding headaches that gradually subside after a period of four to seven days. This is rapidly followed by the onset of fever and small warty lesions at the back of the neck that secrete an oily, rancid green fluid, leading to collar staining. Pores at the forehead can, in dim light, be seen to be issuing a pale green vapor, reputed to have medicinal properties if captured in an appropriate vessel and immediately refrigerated. The oily secretion from the neck should be treated with great caution, as this is the primary source of infection. Other symptoms include religious ranting on street corners, donating all worldly goods to charity, and vigorous rubbing of the back of the neck followed by an insistence on shaking hands with all passers-by.
History
Bombina orientalis or the Fire-Bellied Toad is one of six members of the genus Bombina. It is found at 1,700 to 3,000 meters (5,300 to 10,000 feet) above sea level in southeastern Siberia, northeastern China, and Korea. It spends most of the time floating or swimming in ponds and streams. Original cases of Bufonidic Cephalitis are thought to have been contracted from close interaction during secret Buddhist rituals that involved gentle stroking of the toad’s head followed by opening of the animal’s skull to retrieve the magic gem resting therein. The curative powers of this gem, though since discredited, do however manifest themselves in the hard green growth appearing in the center of victim’s brains, and thus the gem itself is much prized for its restorative powers.
Cures
One of the earliest attempts at a cure for this difficult condition involved trepanning; however, opening of the victim’s skull invariably proved fatal because of the primitive nature of neurosurgical technique. With the modern advances of surgery, it is now possible to open the subject’s skull, remove the gem, and apply it to the subject’s forehead over an extended period. Repetition of the application every three hours for a period of five days is usually sufficient to remove any further onset of the symptoms. One unfortunate side effect of the gem’s removal is the resultant massive and extensive brain damage, in the majority of cases leading to either a complete vegetative state or, ultimately, death. On balance, the medical advantages of performing this procedure and retaining the gem for future use far outweigh the damage done to the patient, and accordingly this treatment cannot be more strongly recommended.
Submitted by
DR. JAY CASELBERG
Cross Reference
Diseasemaker’s Croup
BUSCARD’S MURRAIN
Wormword
Country of Origin
Slovenia (probably)
First Known Case
Primoz Jansa, a reader for a blind priest in the town of Bled in what is now northern Slovenia. In 1771, at the age of 36, Jansa left Bled for London. The first record of his presence there (and the first description of Buscard’s Murrain) is in a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Margaret Cocksedge dated 4th February 1774. (1)
Symptoms
The disease incubates for up to three years, during which time the infected patient suffers violent headaches. After this, full-blown Buscard’s Murrain is manifested in slowly failing mental faculties and severe mood-swings between three conditions: near full lucidity; a feverish seeking out of the largest audience possible; and a state of loud, hysterical glossolalia. Samuel Buscard infamously denoted these states torpid, prefatory, and grandiloquent respectively, thereby appearing to take the side of the disease.
After between three and 12 years, the patient enters the terminal phase of the disease. The so-far gradual mental collapse speeds up markedly, leaving him or her in a permanent vegetative state within months.
Those present during the nonsensical “grandiloquence” of a murrain sufferer report that one particular word—the wormword—is repeated often, followed by a pause as the sufferer waits for a response. If any of those listening repeats the word, the sufferer’s satisfaction is obvious.
Later, it is from among these mimics that the next batch of the infected will be found.
History
At the insistence of the respected Dr. William Haygarth, all murrain sufferers were released into the care of Dr. Samuel Buscard in 1775. (2) During postmortem investigations on the cerebellums of infected victims, Buscard discovered what he thought were parasitic worms, which he named after himself. When a committee of aetiologists examined his evidence, they found that the vermiform specimens were made of cerebral matter itself. Buscard was denounced amid claims that he had made the “worms” himself by perforating the brains with a cheese-screw. The committee renamed the disease Gibbering Fever, and half-heartedly claimed it to be the result of “bad air.”
Samuel Buscard was ordered to surrender Jansa to the committee, but he produced papers showing that his patient had succumbed and been buried. The disgraced doctor then disappeared from public view and died in 1777.
His research was continued by his son Jacob, also a doctor. In 1782, Jacob Buscard astounded the medical establishment with the publication of his famous pamphlet proving that the brain-tissue “worms” were capable of independent motion in the head, and that the cerebrums of sufferers were riddled with convoluted tunnels. “The first Dr. Buscard was thus correct,” he wrote. “Not bad air but a voracious parasite—a murrain—afflicts the gibberers.”
There is a word, which when spoken inveigles its way into the mind of the speaker and manifests itself in his flesh. It forces its bearer to speak itself again and again, in the company of others, that they might be tempted to echo it. With each utterance another wormword is born, until the brain is tunneled quite through: and when those listening repeat what they have heard, in curiosity or mockery, if their utterance is just so, a wormword is hatched in their heads. Not quite the parasite envisaged by my wronged father, but a parasite nonetheless. (3)
Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet dates his revelation to 1780, during one of his numerous interrogations of Jansa in his “torpid” state. Jansa told Buscard that his illness had started one day while he was reading to his master in Bled. Between the pages of the book he had found a slip of paper on which was written two words. Jansa read the first word aloud, and thus started the earliest known outbreak of Wormword. His ensuing headache caused him to drop the paper, which was subsequently lost. “With the translation of those few letters into sound,” Jacob Buscard wrote, “the wretched Jansa became midwife and host to the wormword.” (4)
The younger Buscard’s breakthrough won him a tremendous reputation, marred by his admissions that he and his father had forged Jansa’s death certificate and kept him alive and imprisoned as an experimental subject for the past seven years. Jansa was found in the Buscard basement in the advanced stages of his disease and was taken to a madhouse, where he died two months later. Jacob Buscard escaped prosecution for kidnapping, torture, and accessory to forgery by fleeing to Munich, where he disappeared. (5)
London suffered periodic outbreaks of Buscard’s Murrain until the passage of the Gibbering Act of 1810 legalized the incarceration of the infected in soundproof sanatoria. (6) The era of mass infection was over, and only occasional isolated cases have been recorded since.
It took the late twentieth century and the work of Jacob Buscard’s great-great-great-great-great granddaughter Dr. Mariella Buscard to conclusively dispel the superstitious notions about “evil words” that have clouded even scholarly discussions of the disease. In her seminal 1995 Lancet article “It’s the Synapses, Stupid!”, the latest Dr. Buscard proves the murrain to be simply an unpleasant (though admittedly unusual) biochemical reaction.
She points out that with every action of the human body, including speech, a unique configuration of thousands of minute chemical reactions occurs in the brain. Dr. Buscard shows that when the wormword is spoken with a precise inflection, the concomitant synaptic firing has the unfortunate property of reconfiguring nerve fibers into discrete self-organizing clusters. The tiny chemical reactions, in other words, turn nerves into parasites. Boring through the brain and using their own newly independent bodies to reroute neural messages, these marauding lengths of brain-matter periodically take control of their host. They particularly affect his or her speech, in an attempt to fulfill their instincts to reproduce.
Following the format established in Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet, the wormword is traditionally rendered yGudluh. This is recorded with some trepidation: the main vector for the transmission of Buscard’s Murrain over the last two centuries has been the literature about it. (7)
Cures
Randolph Johnson’s claims about bergamot oil in Confessions of a Disease Fiend are spurious: there is no known cure for Buscard’s Murrain. (8) There is, however, persistent speculation that the second word on Jansa’s lost paper, if spoken, might engender some cure in the brain: perhaps a predatory “hunter” synapse to devour the wormwords. Several “Jansa’s papers” have appeared over the decades, all forgeries. (9) Despite numerous careful searches, Jansa’s paper remains lost. (10)
Submitted by
DR. CHINA MIÉVILLE
Endnotes
(1) “I doubt not that you have heard of Mister Jansa, a fellow of lamentable aspect, who is daily seen around the squares of his adopted city where his intense bearing entices crowds of the curious;—when surrounded the fellow excoriates ’em in obscure tongues such as would shame the most pious and ecstatic of quakers.—Those gathered mock the afflicted with mummery.—But horrors! A number of those who have mimicked poor Jansa have fallen to his brain-fever, and are now partners in his unorthodox ministry.” (Kate Vinegar (ed.), The London Letters of Ignatius Sancho (Providence 1954), p. 337.)
(2) There is no record of Haygarth fraternizing with or even mentioning Dr. Buscard before or after this time, and the reasons behind his 1775 recommendation are opaque. In his diaries, Haygarth’s assistant William Fin noted “a disparity between Dr. H’s words and his tone when he claimed Dr. Buscard as his very good friend” (quoted in Marcus Gadd’s A Buscardology Primer. [London: 1972]. p. iii). De Selby, in his unpublished “Notes on Buscard,” claims that Buscard was blackmailing Haygarth. What incriminating material he might have held on his more esteemed colleague remains unknown.
(3) A Posthumous Vindication of Dr. Samuel Buscard: Proof That “Gibbering Fever” is Indeed Buscard’s Murrain. (London 1782). p. 17.
(4) Ibid., p. 25.
(5) His last known letter (to his son Matthew) is dated January 1783, and contains a hint as to his plans. Jacob complains “I have not even the money to finish this. Carriage to Bled is a scandalous expense!” (Quoted in Ali Khamrein’s Medical Letters [New York 1966]. p. 232.)
(6) These notorious “Buscard Shacks” loom large in popular culture of the time. See for example the ballad “Rather the Poorhouse Than a Buscard Shack” (reproduced in Cecily Fetchpaw’s Hanoverian Street Songs: Populism and Resistance [Pennsylvania 1988] p. 677.).
(7) Contrary to the impression given by the media after the 1986 Statten-Dogger incident, deliberate exposure to the risks of Wormword is neither common nor new. Ully Statten was (no doubt unwittingly) continuing a tradition established in the late eighteenth century. In what could be considered a late Georgian extreme sport, London’s young rakes and coffee-house dandies would take turns reading the word aloud, each risking correct pronunciation and thereby infection.
(8) This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Johnson’s work. The man is a liar, a fraud, and a bad writer (whose brother is Britain’s third-largest importer of bergamot oil).
(9) There is a comprehensive list in Gadd, op. cit., p. 74.
(10) “Years of Violent Ransacking Leave Slovenia’s Historic Churches in Ruins” Financial Times 3/7/85.
Cross References
Diseasemaker’s Croup; Fuseli’s Disease; Logrolling Ephesus; Noumenal Fluke; Printer’s Evil; Wuhan Flu
CATAMENIA HYSTERICA
Pseudo-Menstruation, The Male Curse, Periodic Sympathetic Bleeding, Post-Menopausal Hysterical Menstruation
First Known Case
The folk literature teems with tales of pseudo-menstruation from time immemorial, spanning the globe. The first recorded case can be found in the Bible, in the fourth chapter of Genesis, where Adam’s sixth son, Orem, is described as dressing and behaving like his mother and sisters rather than his father and brothers, with the consequence that God made him to bleed monthly like the former, through an unspecified “privy member.”
Symptoms
Patients bleed for three to five days from an orifice, usually at the onset of the New Moon. Women always bleed from the vagina (although the bleeding is not true menstruation), whereas men bleed most commonly from the urethra, the anus, or the nipples. Bleeding from the navel is extremely rare.
History
The social significance of Catamenia Hysterica has varied so considerably from culture to culture and across time that a stable etiology for the disorder cannot be established. Twelfth-century western Europe, for instance, saw a mass outbreak of the disease at the Cistercian Abbey of Clairveaux, where, under the direction of the saintly Bernard of Citeaux, dozens of young men lured from their studies in Paris by Bernard’s charismatic preaching spontaneously began menstruating at the dark of every moon. Since it was not until the thirteenth century that scientific and theological accounts of menstruation rendered this natural function morally tainted and supernaturally destructive, we may assume that the treatment of both natural menstruation and Catamenia Hysterica in William of Conches’ The Dragmaticon (Paris, 1146) characterized contemporary perceptions of the disease. “These young men worshipped the Virgin so fervently and with such zealous devotion, repeatedly revisiting the important moments of her life in just that way in which all good Christians revisit the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, that they became, in the very tissues of their body, like the Virgin, refraining only from reliving her pregnancy with the Son of God, which would have been a blasphemous rather than a pious enactment of the Virgin’s passion.” Many people considered such pseudo-menstruation to be miraculous, analogous to manifestations of the holy stigmata. William notes that “although some theologians argue that the Virgin did not menstruate, no rational man could believe such a thing, for being a woman, her humors were necessarily cold, though her body and soul be holy and immaculate.”
By contrast, an outbreak of Catamenia Hysterica in Quattrocento, Florence, suggests an entirely different psychogenesis. This occurred among members of a lay organization, the Confraternity of the Miraculous Blood, associated with the church of Sant’ Ambrogio, a confraternity whose mission included the staging of theatrical entertainments in neighboring piazzas for purportedly charitable fundraising. In a sermon San Bernardino delivered at Santa Croce in 1424, following his usual denunciation of the practices of “sodomy”—which, he said, were so entrenched in Tuscany that in many Italian cities “no Tuscan is allowed to live and no schoolmaster may be Tuscan, for fear that he will corrupt the boys”—the preacher inveighed against “those young men of a certain confraternity who, led astray by the superstitious lies of Father Bartolomeo Maffei, have succumbed to the powers of demons, who have made them bleed as though they w
ere women, at the dark of every moon.” Maffei has been identified as a Dominican who claimed that the young men of those confraternities who were so corrupt as to dress themselves in the opulent and elaborate garb of women under guise of acting religious pageantry in the streets would, like Orem, be struck by God with the curse all women had been made to bear for Eve’s sin. A letter written by the prominent humanist Leon Battista Alberti, dated October, 1423, describes the scandal caused by this epidemic of Catamenia Hysterica and observes that the young men afflicted were all “of good families.”
More recently, cases have been isolated rather than communal, and highly private rather than publicized. The fringe-medicine Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, D.C., 2001) characterizes it as a “psychosomatic disorder of gender confusion” that occurs mostly in devoted young husbands who have been married less than 10 years and in the gender-ambivalent sons of dominating mothers. In 1999, only 41 cases were reported in the entire United States.
Cures
No pharmaceutical remedy has been found to address this disease; intensive psychotherapy appears to be the only treatment option at this time. Fortunately, patients often outgrow the disease, which in modern times is rare in men past the age of 35.
Submitted by
DR. L. TIMMEL DUCHAMP
Cross References
Diseasemaker’s Croup; Female Hyper-Orgasmic Epilepsy
CEÒLMHAR BUS
Loosely translated as “Sweet Mouth” or “Melodic Kiss”
Country of Origin
Scotland
First Known Case
The first documented record of the water-borne bacterium that causes this affliction is attributed to Dr. Callum Cowan in his absorbing and establishment-shaking study for the Scottish Executive, Department of Health, “Factors concomitant with the rising incidence of oral caries in school-aged children and adolescents in Scotland” (2000). However, the oral tradition persisting in certain isolated Highland communities hints at a long-lived existence through tales of ancient vernal traditions, and descriptions of physiological effects not unlike those experienced by the peoples of Spitsbergen and the Faroe Islands, if the Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies is to be believed. (1)