The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

by Unknown

  Symptoms

  Dr. Cowan identified the bacterium during his constituent analysis of the most popular foodstuffs consumed by children attending a sample of Glasgow and Edinburgh schools. Unsurprisingly, there turned out to be a strong correlation between acute dental problems and the leading brand of carbonated soft drink. Crucially, drinkers exhibited alarmingly accelerated rates of decay compared to those favoring other brands. Cowan’s investigations revealed that a previously unknown agent was aiding the usual combination of acids and high levels of sugar in breaking down the enamel with frightening ferocity. The source of the bacterium was traced to the water used in a bottling plant, newly opened near Inverness.

  On visiting the plant itself, further investigation into the nature of the bacterium revealed that in isolation it changed the physical properties of tooth enamel, although not in a way that was necessarily hazardous. It was only when carbonated and combined with a high sugar content that it encouraged rot. Without these exacerbating factors, the symptoms were more benign; and when processed to make alcohol, far more interesting.

  History

  Cowan traced the source of the water to the head of the River Carron. During his three-day field trip centered on the tiny village of Glenbeg he took a room in a croft owned by the Macmillans—a family resident in the area for generations. On his last evening, having collected sufficient samples to complete his research, he allowed himself to share a whisky with the family patriarch, Hector Macmillan. As the evening wore on, and his glass refilled, Cowan began to notice that his teeth felt different—as if they had somehow become thicker, and also cleaner. His initial reaction was to take this as a sign that he had had enough hospitality for one evening, but as he went to drain his glass, the crystal tumbler knocked against his teeth. The resultant chime astonished him. Cowan had drunk from Caithness crystal before and knew that it would resonate pleasantly when tapped, but this was no simple ringing note. Instead, a clamor of harmonics emanated from his mouth, shifting in pitch and timbre, cycling through patterns of dissonance and harmony as new overtones and undertones appeared. Even when Cowan closed his mouth, he could still feel a pleasant vibration in his teeth, tingling through his gums, lips, and tongue, and indeed extending further into his body. He noted that his skin had become hypersensitive, and his head somewhat light.

  When Cowan recovered from his surprise, Macmillan explained that the effect was a celebrated phenomenon caused by drinking whisky distilled using the very water Cowan had come there to investigate. For many years, Ceòlmhar Bus featured strongly in the spring festivals held in the villages. Courting couples, inebriated on locally distilled alcohol, would enter in kissing competitions, with prizes given to the couple that lasted longest without breaking apart. Macmillan claimed that if a couple’s teeth were to meet during the kiss, the resulting vibrational waves set up within the resonant cavity of their locked mouths could be difficult to stand. Broken teeth and the occasional cracked jaw were not uncommon consequences of the Ceòlmhar Bus. Just as likely a consequence of the vibrations, however, was for a couple to run off in search of privacy, all thoughts of the prize forgotten. Apparently, Macmillan had met his wife at one such an event.

  Cowan’s later investigations led to a museum in Nairn where he discovered evidence that the water’s properties had been long known about, including stone bowls with druidic carvings and French loving cups from the Jacobite era. Unfortunately, the wide availability of factory-produced alcohol has made current day festivities much more sober affairs, although Glenbeg whisky still features in the more traditional village wedding reception.

  Cures

  No cure is necessary. The action of the bacterium is benign in water alone, and the compositional nature of the enamel into a resonant medium, temporary. However, the Glenbeg area possesses levels of alcoholism and sex addiction significantly above the national average.

  River Carron water is no longer used in the manufacture of carbonated drinks, although the drinks firm in question is said to be looking into expanding into the adult sector. However, as always, the prevention of tooth decay can be boosted by reducing your child’s intake of soft drinks, and encouraging regular flossing and brushing with a fluoride toothpaste.

  To be on the safe side, transfer their tastes from soft drinks to hard liquor as soon as is practicable.

  Submitted by

  DR. N. WILLIAMSON, B.D.S.

  Endnote

  (1) Astute readers whose literary diet extends to the gutter press may remember the welter of publicity that surrounded “Doctors” Trimble and Manard around the time of publication of this “popular” work. Modesty aside, serious students of the diseases of the northern climes could do worse than seek out my own treatise on the subject, Syphilitic Vectors Among the Northern Nomads: Travels with an Inuit Seraglio (Taverna Press, 1995, £39.99).

  Cross Reference

  Diseasemaker’s Croup

  CHRONIC ZYGOTIC DERMIS DISORDER2

  Symptoms

  All bodily tissues, including muscle, adipose, ligament, etc., are enveloped, as if shrink-wrapped, by a single membrane. This membrane, commonly called “the skin,” varies in hue from a light sienna to burnt umber or sepia, often extrudes thickets of filament, dark or light, and exhibits the ability to reseal portions of the victim that may have become exposed due to insult or eruption.

  History

  In their Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies, Trimble and Manard report the case of a Siberian whaler, one Dimitrii Pyetr Alexandrovich, who survived his own skin by (at least) three and one half days. Marooned on an ice floe following the wreck of his ship, the Probosciis, he was discovered next to his quivering dermis by crewmen on an international geophysical survey vessel hailing from the Norwegian port of Vardo. The statement of one of the rescuers, R. Drexler, is worth noting:

  When we first catched sight of the fella a few hundred yards off our port bow, we thought he was bludgeoning a sea lion or a beached squid. The thing slithered like a pudding, sucking at his shins, so it struck us, while he kicked at it and stabbed it with shards of ice. Who’d have thought it was the bugger’s own hide?

  The surveyors transported Alexandrovich to the sick bay, handling his raw and rufous body by means of cotton batting soaked in five per cent boric acid. His skin, still living, indeed, still lurching toward Alexandrovich “like a greased barracuda,” was muscled into the hold where it was caged and kept on round-the-clock armed watch.

  Treatment of the crazed whaler was impeded by his repeatedly scratching off any forming scab tissue: “I won’t have it back, do you hear me? I’m free now! Free!” He tore likewise at the flesh of any crewman within his reach, with such cries as, typically: “Chuck it, brother. Chuck the freeloading vermin. Reclaim your birthright!” etc. Some inaccuracy must be figured in, of course, due to the difficulty of speaking Russian, a language rich in labials and plosives, without lips. His ecstatic exhortations—“oracular,” some called them—kept much of the crew awake nights.

  According to Trimble and Manard’s sources, some crewmen suffered a variety of psychological disorientation as a result of their contact with the skinned Alexandrovich; they had to be sedated and kept under watch. One used a rigging knife to make a latitudinal incision across his scalp; he actually managed to roll down his face as far as the upper lip in an apparent attempt to escape from his own skin. Several of the crewmen who had witnessed or responded to the attempted self-skinning suffered a strange corollary disorder: a severe swelling of the skin surrounding all joints (knees, elbows, knuckles, etc.) and orifices (especially mouth and eyes) that all but immobilized its victims and rendered them temporarily incapable of normal audition, sight, or speech.

  “We knew too much, y’see,” one sailor told an Oslo magistrate in the ensuing inquiry, before being judged psychologically incompetent to testify. (Trimble and Manard, op. cit., v. II, p. 2,563) “But we fooled them damn buggers. We doused oursilves wi carbon tet. Them of us as lived, saw our hides buckle
and throw off hair like as they was darts—before they shivered and shrunk to what you see on me now, a dead yellow hide.”

  The usually incisive Goodman, referring to this case, dismisses Alexandrovich’s sublime pronouncements as an example of “extreme euphoria” (see footnote, p. 213, “Why Your Skin Crawls,” in The Journals of Sarah Goodman, Disease Psychologist), a phenomenon well known to geriatric workers as a burst of electrical activity that animates the cerebral cortex immediately before death, causing sensations of well-being, levity, and (chimerically) insight. However, in this instance, she is almost certainly mistaken, since there is independent confirmation of a number of Alexandrovich’s statements (see below).

  Could Dr. Goodman have been unaware of the discovery beneath the karsts in the vicinity of the Sava River, Yugoslavia, of thousands of perfectly round pools of protein bath, created by a heretofore unknown technology, pools in which certain spore-producing plants were multiplying, spores which, when exposed to sunlight, grew into patches that, but for their strange provenance, were indistinguishable from human skin? Had she been on sabbatical, perhaps, during the summer of 1958 when the scores of reports from panicked Serbo-Croatian spelunkers flooded the foreign press, reports of tarpaulin-like creatures pursuing and enveloping them “like a second skin”?

  We may never know the cause of Dr. Goodman’s lapse, but there can be no doubt that these latter were a second wave of the same parasitic creatures that invaded Earth during the Pleistocene epoch (before which one can find absolutely no evidence in the fossil record of any variety of skin). Clear references to this invasion are found in the mythologies of all climes and cultures. Dr. Mudthumper (see, for example, his Encyclopedia of Forgotten Oriental Diseases, in the entry for “Alien”), has assembled a partial list of these references that includes: “Sucking Monster” (Navajo), “Strangling Band” (Chinese), “That-Which-Hugs-and-Bristles” (Ashanti), etc. With this in mind, the equally ubiquitous legends of a primordial “nakedness,” a condition of innocence and the absence of encumbrance, can now be understood to refer to the condition of humans (and other creatures) prior to the pandemic infestation of all Earth by the invading dermis.

  Once having entered the host animal, the dermis parasite attaches its gamete to the host’s gamete and reproduces along with the host, generation after generation.

  Treatment

  Typically, the patient is given a general anesthetic, a subdermal separating agent is introduced (Johnson & Johnson’s Vaseline, 100 per cent USP, heated to 70 degrees Celsius, is used at the Clinique Pour Eviter Les Gens Contrefacons in Aix), a single incision is made along the beltline, and the parasite is slipped off in two neat sections. It is immediately incinerated or kept in a pickling solution for later study. Under hospital conditions, there have been no cases of resistance or attack by the peeled skin.

  The patient is then treated in the manner of any severe burn victim, except that measures will be taken to prevent the regrowth of skin. The patient can expect hours or even days in this luminous, pristine, liberated condition, before expiring.

  Of course, the reader will have gathered that these procedures are insufficient to prevent CZDD in offspring, due to the insertion of the alien’s DNA into the host’s sequence. At present all that can be done is to treat each new case as it arises; however, there are encouraging signs in diverse quarters. Researchers at the International Institute for Depilatory Studies in Utrecht are working on a method of disentangling the alien strand by means of a high-tech microscopic noodle press. Other workers have focused with some success on a new method of human reproduction in which, using a process suggested by pot de creme au chocolat, volunteers perform the sexual process while tightly covered with waxed paper, preventing the formation of skin.

  Submitted by

  ELIOT FINTUSHEL, I.P.O., D.D.T., Q.E.D., S.P.Q.R., ETC.

  Cross References

  Bone Leprosy; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Hsing’s Spontaneous Self-Flaying Sarcoma; Internalized Tattooing

  CHRONO-UNIFIC DEFICIENCY SYNDROME

  CHRUDS

  First Known Case

  The earliest known cases of this disease appeared in the southwestern United States and western Russia within a decade of the first above-ground nuclear tests, and their dissemination roughly follows those tests’ wind-borne fallout patterns.

  Symptoms and (False) History

  CHRUDS affects those areas in the brain associated with recall, particularly the temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. Cells there undergo a series of radiation-induced mutations that result in the patient experiencing an intense sense of memory. These memories do not, however, revolve around events in the patient’s own life, but around events in the lives of others. The onset of symptoms is marked by frequent vague sensations of dejà vu on the part of the patient, superceded by the realization that the episode he or she has apparently just re-experienced was in fact re-experienced recently by a loved one or close friend who had off-handedly narrated it to the patient a day or two previously. This “counterfeit twofold dejà vu,” as Dr. Sarah Goodman names it in passing in her wide-ranging journals, gives way within a matter of six to 14 months to symptoms consistent with mid-stage CHRUDS—i.e., increasingly intense recollections of the patient’s biological parents’ childhoods (even if said biological parents were not the patient’s primary care givers), especially with respect to smoky scents allied with breakfasts grilling in small kitchens, wet involuntary noises produced by the machinations of infantile digestion, and common panics associated with various philosophical manifestations of solipsism. These latter include, but are not limited to, the apprehension that one exists within a drama which is both solely the product of one’s own imagination and in which one cannot seem to remember one’s lines, that it is impossible to prove the world exists behind one’s back when one is facing forward, and that one inadvertently yet repeatedly becomes invisible for short periods of time in such social situations as birthday parties, family picnics, and elementary school classrooms. In late-stage CHRUDS, whose onset occurs within five to seven years after the appearance of the initial symptoms, the patient’s personal memories are slowly but completely replaced by those of historical personages. These “authentic false memories” (see Jorge Luis Borges’ seldom-consulted article on the subject, “Funes the Memorious”) can be rooted in individuals throughout history. For unknown reasons, some patients recall thoughts of Mesopotamian scribes who can themselves recollect nothing except infinite lists of numbers and unrecognizable names scrolling through their psyches, coupled with the sadness of black ink stains on their thumbs and forefingers. Others recall medieval Swedish marauders wrestling with insectile angels in the polar nights among the flat wastes above the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, most sufferers seem to locate their Psychic Gravitational Nucleus, or PGN (see Dr. Randolph Johnson’s chapter, “The Influence of Gravity on the Cerebral Cortex and Occipital Lobes,” in Confessions of a Disease Fiend), in the ill-fated Donner Party, which during the winter of 1846-47 became snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and by spring was forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. Lewis Keseberg, the vigorous, intelligent, blond Westphalian in his early thirties, is most often cited as the specific PGN in the Donner Party. Keseberg deteriorated quickly after the initial catastrophe, soon coming to relish the making of soup from the brains and livers of his colleagues’ corpses. He went on to open a briefly successful restaurant on K Street in Sacramento in 1848 after the Donner ordeal, rapidly gained unpleasant notoriety in the community, soon lost all his money, and ultimately sank out of sight, apparently (according at least to the memories of CHRUDS patients) impersonating a medical doctor and moving to London’s East End in 1888 to see out his life. The last vision to pass through his consciousness was of myriad victims of a disease that would appear 56 years later, whose major symptom would be an intense sense of memory.

  Cures

  The only known cure for CHRUDS is the toil of forgetfulness. One should therefore attempt t
o clear one’s mind of other people’s memories by filling it with future memories of one’s own invention.

  Forward-imagine, for instance, the last alert look your lover will pass to you from his or her deathbed, how she or he will meet your eyes from behind a face that has become a blanched papier-mâché mask, how all language but the language of that look will be forgotten in that instant like an aphasic searching for the right word, because no matter what you did yesterday, what you do today, or what you might do tomorrow, you will come to inhabit some variation of that scene while being continually shocked that you are inhabiting it.

  Unfortunately, this cure is seldom successful.

  Submitted by

  DR. LANCE OLSEN

  Cross References

  Delusions of Universal Grandeur; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Download Syndrome; Pathological Instrumentation Disorder

  CLEAR RICE SICKNESS

  Alimentary-Induced Alkalai Atenebraeism

  Country of Origin

  China

  First Known Case

  An Yan, in Zhoukoudian, Hebei, 1673

  Symptoms

  Atenebraeity, night sweats, and a variety of other sleep disorders, hot and cold flashes, photophobia, transparency, episodic tremor, panic, hallucination, confusion, disorientation, and/or memory loss.