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

  History

  Long unfamiliar to western medicine, the first known record of Clear Rice Sickness is found in the Lü shi chun jiu, compiled in the 230s B.C.E. As in most succeeding accounts, the disease is described in highly elusive and aesthetic terms of little to no medical value. For more detailed information, the historical researcher must avail himself of the diaries of Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest, who assisted the Kangxi Emperor in suppressing a rebellion in 1673 by supervising the casting of cannon for use by Imperial forces. Earlier that year, Verbiest had paid an extended visit to the An family in Zhoukoudian; during his first night with them, he was twice startled awake by the mysterious cries of a male voice, apparently emanating from a small, chicken-coop-sized outbuilding on his host’s property. Upon making discreet inquiries the following morning, Verbiest was informed by an embarrassed An Jeng that the voice he had heard in the night belonged to his second son Yan, who was suffering from a rare illness attributed to the consumption of rice contaminated with a particular root-parasite. Verbiest was shown a handful of grains of rice “of the clarity of limpid water, with a minute indigo bead growing in its flesh, near one end. I was informed that, as infected plants produce only a few grains of clear rice, while those remaining are normal in appearance, the poison grains are easily missed by the inattentive.” Only a small amount of the alkalai compounds introduced into the rice grains by the parasite is enough to produce permanent and drastic physical changes. Onset is swift—the victim is subject to increasingly protracted periods of agitation with a significantly magnified startle-response, will experience a great variety of sleep-disorders including nightmares, sleepwalking, vocalizations, insomnia, waking dreams, and spontaneous trances resembling epileptic seizures. Shortly thereafter, the sufferer’s shadow is stricken, and gradually thins away to nothing. After attenuation of the shadow is total, it is noted that light not only passes through the subject (Verbiest was shown this property of the disease firsthand, and testifies that he saw the sun shining through An Yan “as though he were a coarsely-woven blanket”) but appears to be focused by his body. Wu Ciwei, who died in 1641 and whose work anticipated several European discoveries in optics, noted this effect as his own inspiration to produce “water lenses,” assuming that the water in the patient’s body refracted light as it passed through him. It is clear from all accounts that this transparency to light causes the patient extreme anxiety and, if not physical pain, a sort of emotional anguish, and even terror. Given their relatively constant state of heightened anxiety, and their generally inexplicable and alarming behavior, victims of Clear Rice Sickness are colloquially referred to in China as “the Companions of Fear.”

  In subsequent years, little more has come to light about Clear Rice Sickness, and there seems to be mounting aversion to the topic itself through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent anthropological studies conducted by Chinese university professors and students have turned up startling findings. An Yan, it appears, was an atypical case, in that he remained at home with his parents. While a great many CRS victims are driven from their communities by the superstitious fear of their neighbors, the majority leave on their own, evidently finding life among unaffected persons too difficult, or frightening. Conversely, “the Companions of Fear” figure in widespread folktales as bogeys and wildmen who haunt the hills and forests, and devour human flesh. Recently-volunteered data suggest that there may be a grain of truth in this legend. Hmong tribesmen of southwestern China, near the borders of Viet Nam and Burma, have described terrifying nocturnal raids by keening strangers who seem to fly unerringly through the dark, and who move in a bizarre, electrified manner. The Hmong claim that these beings have their own small kingdom in the rainforest, and surveyors have stumbled upon rice paddies of unknown origin and recent cultivation in plainly artificial clearings deep in the most impenetrably dense jungle: the rice found growing there was all severely infested with the aforementioned root parasites and exhibited a profusion of clear grains. And, in the unpublished records of an English entomologist named Eustace Bucke, a number of underexposed photographs represent his attempt to capture the appearance at dusk of an enigmatic figure at the edge of the forest near the Burmese border on August 13,1885; he writes: “. . . he watched me steadily as I set up my equipment, and so I was permitted ample time to ‘take him in.’ His body was caked entirely in dried indigo mud, and his head was a mass of leaves, with only a rectangular opening, rather like a mail slot, for his eyes, which shone even in the dusk with a peculiar lustre.”

  Cures

  As of yet, research into treatment has made almost no progress. Efforts to isolate the particular combination of proteins and alkaloid compounds believed to produce symptoms are ongoing.

  Submitted by

  DR. MICHAEL CISCO, C.C., B.P.O.E., S.V.S.E.

  Cross References

  Diseasemaker’s Croup; Flora Metamorphosis Syndrome

  DENEGARE SPASTICUS

  Spastic Denial Syndrome

  Country of Origin

  Holmes County, Mississippi, United States

  First Known Case

  August(?), 1985. Walter Jay Jay Williams, age seven. The patient’s single mother, Felonia Paula Williams, reports that she tried to feed her son soup beans (“It’s usually one of his favorites when we have it with cabbage but I couldn’t afford no cabbage that week.”) for dinner one night (“It must have been August—it was hot, our clothes were all sticky and we’d been yelling at each other all damn day.”). (1)

  The patient reacted by moving his head back and forth as if to say “no.” The mother assumed that, indeed, the young boy had no desire to eat his soup beans that evening and was therefore communicating this negative in no uncertain terms. Miss Williams informed her son that this was the only form of nourishment currently available, funds were limited, and that “he’d damn well better eat every last bean on his plate or else.” The boy continued to shake his head in denial, however, and after a period of approximately one hour Miss Williams grew alarmed at the persistence of this behavior. The speed at which the boy’s head snapped back and forth appeared to increase throughout the evening, so that by ten o’clock the boy’s head was moving so rapidly his facial features were discernible only with great difficulty. His mother later told me, “It was like his head was saying no so much it got stuck somehow, like one of his neck gears got wore out or something.” This first bout of the boy’s Spastic Denial lasted most of two days before eventually slowing down and halting altogether. Subsequent attacks have lasted as long as one month.

  Symptoms

  This fierce pantomime of denial is by far the most dramatic and persistent symptom of Spastic Denial. Fifty-six subsequent patients have accompanied these head shakings with verbal explosions such as “No!” “Nyet!” “Nein!” “Hell, no!” depending on country of origin. A few patients have also exhibited spastic hand gestures, including one Jack Chancelor, a 41-year-old accountant from Biloxi, who also beat rhythmically on a kettledrum during his attacks.

  History

  From Holmes County, Mississippi, Spastic Denial spread throughout the state and into Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Virginia and the Carolinas have unaccountably been spared any cases. Isolated cases have also made their appearance in the poorer sections of New York, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires, and in Hamburg, Paris, and Liverpool overseas. There have been numerous reports of massive outbreaks in several Indian states, with increases in head speed leaving dozens of people dead from broken necks. The Indian government has officially denied these reports. Religious leaders in the regions affected have stated, simply, that it is a “spiritual” matter.

  The reported outbreaks of Spastic Denial among youth enclaves in Chicago and Seattle are suspect, doubtless being a self-imposed copycat symptomology used to induce dizziness and euphoria, often accompanied by frenzied dancing.

  Cures

  For most cases of Spastic Denial there has been no cure: the symp
toms simply disappear with age or an improvement in the family’s economic circumstances. Since some believe this Denial comes out of a philosophical and psychological abhorrence of intolerable conditions, additional funds for food, job, and educational programs may be in order.

  This doctor feels that this condition may be somewhat more complicated than was first believed. Surely we have all shaken our heads at the world from time to time, but the vast majority of us realize that eventually we must stop saying no and get on with our lives. Life is, indeed, difficult, but denying this is so does not make life any easier. This realization has been denied to the victims of Spastic Denial. Once the head has begun to shake in these patients, only exhaustion, solvency, or breakage will stop it. There is no experience quite like that of walking into a ward full of Spastic Denials and being greeted by speed-blurred faces and choruses of No No No!

  It makes one shake one’s head over the folly of denying what one sees right in front of one’s face, but perhaps that is an opinion best left unexpressed until a true cure for the disease has been found.

  Submitted by

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

  Endnote

  (1) Further investigation has revealed that the child was greatly disappointed because his mother told him she could not afford the 50-cent fee for a school excursion that week. However, the relevance of said disappointment to the outbreak of the disease is unclear.

  Cross Reference

  Diseasemaker’s Croup

  DELUSIONS OF UNIVERSAL GRANDEUR

  DUG

  Symptoms

  DUG is a disease characterized by a severe delusional belief that the universe is ever more gigantic. Sufferers assert with great confidence that the universe is expanding continuously to absurdly large dimensions. The delusion typically is accompanied by a belief that the universe is vastly old. Sufferers tend to be aware of each other and compete with greater and greater assertions of size and antiquity.

  In advanced stages of the disease, patients develop a companion, and seemingly opposite, belief that this supposedly vast universe consists of smaller and smaller “elementary” particles. The sufferer postulates—and then pretends to find—these miraculously small particles. In a manner reminiscent of sexual fetishism, none of these discoveries ever satisfy, and the patient must break them down yet again to insist on even smaller divisions. The large and small aspects of the disease meet in the manner of the “discoveries,” for the deluded seekers construct giant machines to find their imaginary particles. The smaller the particle, the bigger the machine.

  In a recent development—disturbing, since it suggests the disease has mutated—some patients have developed an obsession with invisible, or “dark,” particles. By the bizarre logic of the illness, the fact that they cannot see such particles assures that they must be there. Some even claim that these ultimate invisible particles are precisely what fills up the empty spaces in their ballooning giant universe.

  History

  Nobody knows how or even when DUG began. An ingenious theory from Dr. Carmen Muncie (University of Toronto) suggests that the disease originated in a cynical set of programs for Sweeps Week on the Discovery Channel. (This would, of course, not be the first disease to originate in this way. See my own paper, “The Fellatio of Language: CNN and the Etiology of Lewinsky Fever.”) However, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have demonstrated that the earliest cases predate cable.

  The search for a Patient Zero has proven fruitless, as early cases seem to recede further and further into the past. Indeed, the disease has proven so infectious that researchers themselves have fallen prey, with the resultant claim that a Patient Zero is impossible, since first cases will break down into earlier and earlier, and smaller and smaller, symptoms.

  Treatment

  At present, both a cure and a vaccine seem as far away as sufferers’ own fruitless search for the ultimate particle. Jensen and Jensen (Copenhagen University) have shown some success with drug treatments on the spatial lobes of the brain, so that the patient can no longer see very large or very small objects. Unfortunately, side effects seem to include severe loss of libido. Garrowey (University of Indiana) has claimed success with rational-discursive therapy, but so far other researchers have been unable to duplicate her results. Group therapy and 12-step support groups have not fulfilled early expectations, as patients have tended to organize into secret “research projects.” Some governments have responded to the crisis by blocking the construction of the giant “telescopes” and “accelerators” the obsession seems to demand. Current research focuses on containment of the disease, with quarantine of sufferers at the earliest signs of an outbreak.

  Submitted by

  DR. RACHEL POLLACK, UNIVERSITY OF RHINEBECK

  Cross References

  Chrono-Unific Deficiency Syndrome; Diseasemaker’s Croup

  DI FORZA VIRUS SYNDROME

  Viral Erotamania; Sex-Mania Plague

  First Known Case

  The case of Jeanne Thibodeaux, aged 55, of Broussard, Louisiana, was the first to be identified. This St. Martin High School Biology I teacher was discovered dead in bed with a vibrator pressed to her groin on April 6, 2001 (with the vibrator’s batteries having completely discharged). She died of the symptoms of the virus rather than of the virus itself.

  Symptoms

  Hypertension, flushed skin, accelerated pulse, distended bladder (from failure to micturate), myotonia, enlarged labia or engorged penis, vasocongestion with abundant accompanying secretion, constantly erect clitoris or penis and nipples, dilated pupils, rapid, shallow respiration, profuse perspiration, acute dehydration, sleep deprivation, and abnormally high levels of testosterone in the blood (regardless of the sex of the patient). Those infected focus exclusively on their obsession with sexual orgasm, which they constantly experience with or without masturbation.

  History

  The virus, named for Dr. Laurel di Sforza, a member of the CDC team assigned to investigate, contain, and find a cure for the disease who herself contracted the virus in the course of the assignment, was likely created by accident in a biogenetics laboratory located on the Broussard Highway near Lafayette, Louisiana. (The CDC has consistently declined to confirm or deny the allegation, which originally surfaced in the Times-Picayune.) Attention was first drawn to the disease by the outbreak of what appeared to be 39 unrelated spousal murders within six days in St. Martin Parish, precipitated by the manifestation of symptoms of erotamania in the infected. Although the CDC rapidly established that the erotamania was a symptom rather than a cause of the disease, few people in Southwest Louisiana seemed able to grasp the distinction. For weeks, the local news media juxtaposed images of rows of patients lying under restraint, their genitals covered with coldpacks, with security-camera videos of men and women, oblivious to their surroundings, masturbating in public. Commentators on Lafayette Talk Radio, claiming that the disease was caused by masturbation, promoted the slogan that “Masturbation is to the sex-mania plague as homosexuality is to AIDS!” The national news media took only a brief (and surprisingly discreet) interest in the disease, such that most people outside of the region affected consider reports of the disease a new urban legend. However, the Religious Right has frequently expressed outrage at the very existence of the disease, and uses this outrage to fuel its campaign for federal legislation requiring that public schools in receipt of federal funding inculcate children against the evils of masturbation.

  After hundreds of fatalities and severe damage to Southwest Louisiana’s considerable tourist industry, the CDC successfully identified the virus and the vector of its transmission (i.e., airborne insects). In its report, the CDC team declared itself virtually certain that the disease was first transmitted through a batch of boudin made in a small family business located on the Broussard Highway. Contact with insects likely tainted the boudin with the virus. The team e
stablished that most of that batch was distributed through a convenience store outlet at the Henderson exit on Interstate Route 10, a favorite hang-out of Cajuns who hunt and fish in the Atchafalaya Basin. Since several Interstate travelers died from the disease out-of-state, the team hypothesized that the remains of a boudin sandwich left in a roadside trashcan made the virus available to the extensive population of insects that inhabit the nearby Atchafalaya Basin, a very large body of standing water usually covered with a thick green scum. Dr. di Sforza and New Orleans physician Michael Jaspers displayed symptoms of the disease after having picnicked at a park near the Basin. Recognizing her symptoms and without hope for a cure, Dr. di Sforza ended her own life on June 1.

  On July 15, the team implemented the highly controversial method of releasing a re-engineered version of the virus designed to render the insects that carried it sterile. When news of this methodology became public, a Senate subcommittee summoned Dr. Julius Schaefer, the head of the team, and rebuked him for having taken such a risky course of action; Dr. Schaefer was subsequently removed from his position under a cloud of opprobrium. (It has been rumored that certain members of the subcommittee were deeply angered by Dr. Schaefer’s insistence that the disease not be referred to as “the sex mania plague.”) The virus was nonetheless virtually eradicated. Dr. Schaefer’s replacement received credit for the eventual success of this method, and was duly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Despite this success, the odd case occasionally presents itself, largely in the Southeastern United States, and occasionally in other subtropical locations around the globe. The epidemiology of the disease has become sufficiently complicated by the release of the re-engineered virus that a clear explanation has yet to be worked out. A researcher at Rice University, Dr. Winston Pharr, has theorized that the virus has mutated, but given his inability to make a positive identification of the mutation, this explanation remains purely speculative.