The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

by Unknown

  The male flukes, by contrast, swim to the dog’s gums. Meanwhile, the dog seeks out the exact shade of blue that characterizes the shorts of the uniforms of Los Angeles postal workers. The dog sinks his teeth into the ankle of the first postman that he encounters. The male flukes smell the ankle and hurriedly penetrate the nearest follicle.

  The offending dog is blinded by pepper spray, captured by an animal control officer, and put to sleep by barbiturate injection. The carcass is sold to a wholesale meat supplier and then resold to local markets, restaurants, and lunch stands as a frozen component of 100 per cent ground beef. (The term “100 per cent ground beef” is applied somewhat loosely in Los Angeles.)

  When the dormant females in the dog meat sense a human intestine around them, they shake off their cysts, tunnel into the villi, and circulate, chemically disguised as human corpuscles, until they enter the cerebral meninges. If the females are fortunate, their new host is a recently bitten postal carrier. If so, the male flukes (last seen in the host’s ankle) have preceded the females into the cranium and used their oral suckers to build meningeal love nests for undisturbed mating. Ensconced therein, the females anchor themselves and dilate their genital pores.

  During the first phase of the syndrome, the afflicted postal carrier feels flushed and dizzy each day at dusk. He or she develops an obsessive fantasy in which he or she fills his or her pockets with coins or other small metal objects and climbs to the top of a telephone pole in the dead of night in a thunderstorm. When a nocturnal storm occurs, the fantasy is acted out. If the postal carrier is struck by lightning, he or she will fall to the street—a steaming, twitching corpse. This is, so to speak, where we came in.

  Afflicted carriers may survive the disease for years, suffering compulsive episodes all the while. But, if the carrier is restrained from pole climbing, he or she will swallow his or her tongue, turn blue, and suffocate.

  If I may be allowed a zoological digression within a medical text, please consider the utter strangeness of this life cycle. The fluke’s reproductive success depends on a chain of events so unlikely as to appear implausible.

  Flukes are known among the triploblastic acoelomate worms for the unnecessary and seemingly maladaptive complexity of their life cycles, which can involve as many as 11 distinct host organisms. (1) Yet even among the flukes, the PCBF appears excessive, even exhibitionistic. It seems almost as though the PCBF is performing an extinction-defying trapeze act purely for the sake of impressing other parasites. (2)

  Cures

  Any number of vermifugal interventions suggest themselves. The Sunset Boulevard Community Health Clinic & Pet Shelter reports that a heavy dosage of Slavopropin or Meforbifak can be used to induce clonotronchic seizure in the female fluke with subsequent prolapsis and infarction of the ovipositor. The effect on infested patients was immediate, and fatality resulted in less than 40 percent of recorded cases.

  Alternately, clinical trials of the experimental vermicides Spinwex D and Cactosprain 113 have been suggested by various out-of-work pharmacologists. All of these courses of treatment are fraught with unpleasantness, but they’re probably better than climbing a phone pole in a thunderstorm with your pockets full of small metal objects.

  If qualified vermologists with California state legislature connections can obtain preserved tissues for dissection, a thorough histological work-up is indicated. If live specimens of the fluke can be procured, some smart young lab rat in the public health sector could probably put together a reputation-making research agenda. Cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, and a consenting population of federal prisoners or chimpanzees could be employed as hosts. Investigations into the molecular mechanisms of the fluke’s navigation, immune suppression, and behavioral modification techniques would surely follow. (3)

  Submitted by

  STEPAN CHAPMAN, DOCTOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY, INSTITUTE FOR FURTHER STUDY, WAXWALL, ARIZONA, UNITED STATES

  Endnotes

  (1) “Vectors of Parasitism Considered As Sub-Chaotic Attractors For Symbiotic Neurolepsy,” Forsfed Forbran DTZ, The Royal Journal of Worms vol. 59 #4, Berne Switzerland, 1987.

  (2) Vanity: Watch Spring of Evolution, Verner Kempt DDT, Catarrh Press, Oshkosh Wisconsin, 1993.

  (3) Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer, The Free Press, New York City, 2000.

  Cross References

  Diseasemaker’s Croup; Jumping Monkworm; Mongolian Death Worm Infestation; Noumenal Fluke

  PRINTER’S EVIL10

  Paper Pox

  Country of Origin

  Printer’s Evil first appeared in Central Europe, although its true origin is presumed to be China or possibly Ancient Egypt.

  First Known Case

  Albrecht Schicklgruber, apprentice to the printing house of Gustav Doppelgänger, the city of Worms in the Rhineland Palatinate, 1523

  Symptoms

  Primarily a disease of the printing trade, hence the name, Printer’s Evil was undoubtedly known before the advent of moving type, although evidence to this effect remains circumstantial. The condition begins as an inflammation of the skin caused by contact with a pathogenic slime mold, Papyroplasmapora infestans. This fungus occurs worldwide and is commonly parasitical to many varieties of paper and wood pulp material. Generally harmless in its dormant state, the introduction of inks or other materials to the paper surface inspires the fungus to rapid zoosporangia proliferation. To date, there has been little research into the precise chemical nature of compounds triggering zoosporangia; assertions that squid-derived inks may constitute an active agent have little basis in fact. Paper sufficiently infested with the growth transmits spores to the skin upon contact; the spores penetrate the epithelium and root themselves in the sub-cutaneous cellular tissue. The fungal manifestation, when it occurs in books, can easily be mistaken for the effects of damp, differing, however, in the respect that it corrupts the surface of the paper and so also tends to corrupt the arrangement of the letters on the page. Heavily infested books were often held to be “rewriting” themselves, as the letters seem to change shape and form new words.

  The skin inflammation begins by draining the affected areas of blood, then gradually dries the epithelium. Doctors chronicling the disease refer to this as the “paper stage.” Once the spores are rooted in the muscle tissue, fine, thread-like rhizoids (tendrils) appear at the epidermal surface to form a variegated pattern across the affected areas of skin. This is known as the “ink stage,” the visible rhizoids bearing some resemblance to cursive letter forms. Without treatment, the spores continue to spread through the muscle tissue until every area of the infected subject manifests the condition.

  Once the ink stage is complete, the skin and muscle tissue becomes completely desiccated and begins to fall away from the limbs of the patient. Needless to say, death quickly follows this final stage of the disease. However, Printer’s Evil is only infectious via active spores in paper material; once the fungus is rooted in the skin, contagion ceases.

  A further development of the disease has seen its progress divided into two separate conditions, called, somewhat facetiously, Upper Case and Lower Case. Lower Case Printer’s Evil confines itself to the skin tissues alone, while Upper Case attacks the nervous system, leading to violent muscular spasms (so-called “Gutenberg’s Dance”) and severe fever. The fever, which represents the climax of the Upper Case, induces hallucinations in which the patient believes that the rhizoid marks now visible upon the skin are words, and that the affected limbs and torso are pages from a book. At the height of the fever, the patient will find it necessary to declaim loudly the words that he or she belives are being written upon the flesh. To date, there is no satisfactory cure once zoosporangic infection has taken hold. All that can be done is to alleviate the patient’s suffering.

  History

  The case of Albrecht Schicklgruber is described in a letter from Doppelgänger to Ulrich von Schreck:

  Much aggrieved this morning with the revelation that our latest edition of The Bible, numbering
some thousand copies, is almost entirely ruined, there being copious errors and even seeming rewritings throughout. The apprentice I deemed responsible was pitched down a flight of stairs where I then passed water upon him despite his pleas of innocence. Owing to the laws against bad printings of the Lord’s Book, we were forced to sell some at a reduced price to a caravan of Belgian pilgrims then threw the rest in the river. However, I now find Albrecht’s claim that the paper was infected with a pox to be sincere as this has spread itself to his arms and chest. The condition and his scratchings are hideous to behold so I sent him home, afeared he might be smitten with a pestilence. (1)

  For reasons yet to be adequately explained, Bibles have induced more than 70 per cent of documented cases of Printer’s Evil. The most notable incident concerned the “Bad Bibles of Babelsburg” of 1611. A group of Lutheran clerics was stricken with the Upper Case condition and for a few days paraded through the streets of the town, proclaiming their bodies to be collectively the new “Gospel According to St Anthony.” These fevered announcements proved singularly obscene and blasphemous. Before their conditions could degenerate further, they were herded into the town square and onto a bonfire, where they burned in “a merry conflagration.” (2)

  In eighteenth-century London, Upper Case sufferers were sought after as “bookmen” for entertainment at social gatherings. The stricken person would be introduced seated in a cage and allowed to declaim from his or her imaginary “book” for the amusement of the assembled party. Dr. Johnson complained to Boswell that a contemporary wrote “doggerel of a most diabolic nature, worthy of a bookman’s ranting.” (3) A small number of transcribed bookmen rants date celebrated “I Am Unhinged, Africa.” Rumors persist that a number of well-known literary works from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century owe some of their content to these outpourings. However, when noted Argentine critic H. Bustos Domecq asserts that “half the books published in South America are either infected with, or the products of, Brinter’s Evil.” (4) we must assume he is speaking metaphorically.

  In London and Paris of the 1890s, writes on the fringes of the Decadent movement sought to deliberately infect themselves with the disease in the quest for outré inspiration. There is no record of any successful literally product resulting from these exploits, although the collection Fungoids by vanished poet manqué Enoch Soames contains the lines “Books of Evil, Printer’s Evil / Infect me with a black delight.” (5)

  With the advent of industrialized printing process and the introduction of bleached papers and new inks, the disease has become increasingly uncommon and seems now to be almost extinct. One of the last notable cases occurred in 1928 when Louis Garou, a Parisian bookdealer, contracted the Lower Case condition from a Bavarian Psalter. Upon hearing this, André Breton had Garou’s body stolen immediately after death with the intention of transcribing the “words” on the man’s skin and publishing the result as a Surrealist “roman trouvé.” The transcription proved impossible due to the extreme desiccation of the skin, although the incident did give birth to the Surrealist phrase “exquisite corpse.” Further plans to exhibit Garou in a public convenience were thwarted by the offices of the Bureau Sanitaire.

  The scarcity of this disease in the present day must be due in part to the insurance requirements of large publishers. Smaller companies, particularly those failing to exercise careful control over materials, are no doubt most at risk from new infections. With the resurgence of small press ventures in recent years we may yet see an equivalent resurgence of the Paper Pox.11

  Submitted by

  DR. JOHN COULTHART, DIP. LO.D., OC. U.S., THE SAVOY INSTITUE OF PATHOLOGICAL ARTS AND SCIENCES, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

  Endnotes

  (1) Robert Spridgeon, Type, Torment and Torquemada, Uppsala, 1954.

  (2) Ibid.

  (3) James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762–63Yale, 1950.

  (4) H. Bustos Domecq, A Muster of Monumental Mountebanks, Buenos Aires, 1962.

  (5) Enoch Soames, Fungoids, London, 1893.

  Cross References

  Buscard’s Murrain; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Fungal Disenchantment; Menard’s Disease; Rashid’s Syndrome; Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation; Third Eye Infection; Wuhan Flu

  RASHID’S SYNDROME

  Fictonecrosis (popularly “Bibliophagia”)

  Country of Origin

  Arabia (now Saudi Arabia)

  First Known Case

  The earliest properly documented case dates from the tenth century, when Hashim al-Rashid, a merchant of Medina, returned from traveling the Silk Road to Urumqui and Kashkar in China. On his return home, al-Rashid displayed symptoms of early tertiary Fictonecrosis. He seized and consumed an antique Quran, a family heirloom whose parchment was said to have been made by the legendary Bilal himself; al-Rashid was discovered and prevented from eating a second treasure, an ancient manuscript of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”; the remains can be viewed in the Museum of Ancient History in Sydney. The tooth marks of Hashim al-Rashid can be clearly seen on the upper third of the manuscript.

  The unfortunate Hashim al-Rashid disappeared mysteriously from his sickbed; left behind was a bound and illuminated copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The family insist that, in the final phases of his disease, al-Rashid had in fact become the book; however, scientific minds have learned to regard the unsubstantiated speculations of the unqualified as mere hysterical fabulation.

  Symptoms

  Fictonecrosis progresses through three phases. The fictonecrotic initially presents relatively mild symptoms, most notably restlessness, irritability, and a vague but growing sense of unease. It is in the secondary phase that distinctive symptoms develop: an urge to read that surpasses other motivations, including the sexual drive; a crabbed, stooped posture caused by marked forward curvature of the spine; and an impulse to smell and taste the leaves and bindings of books.

  In the tertiary, and fatal, phase of Fictonecrosis, the infection breaks free of the central nervous system and invades the lymph, adrenal, and pineal glands. The fictonecrotic’s body chemistry becomes imbalanced, and the body attempts to compensate by inducing an irresistible craving for paper and ink products: primarily printed books, but if books are not available, raw ink and unused reams of paper will be consumed. Failing that, the fictonecrotic will consume any material that could conceivably be substituted for ink and paper. Acrylic paints, textiles, wood or plastic veneer, food colorings, and opaque ceramics have all been the subject of fictonecrotic cravings. In extremis, the fictonecrotic may even consume the skin and blood of animal or human.

  Under electron microscopy and chemical analysis, the red blood corpuscles were found to be contaminated with a compound more commonly found in squid or cuttlefish ink. The epidermis of the subject is progressively replaced with fibrous cellulose in laminar sheets, while veins and capillaries migrate between those sheets. In the tertiary (and terminal) phase, the displaced blood vessels develop clusters of microscopic lesions, which selectively release the contaminated hemoglobin between the leaves. It must be stressed that any similarity to printed text is purely coincidental; however, the credulous have attributed miraculous powers to the parchment-like leaves produced by a tertiary-phase fictonecrotic.

  In rare cases, hair follicles and cuticles are overstimulated, producing a matted layer of keratin over the skin. Sebaceous glands, irritated by the poor ventilation beneath the keratin matting, compensate with a greatly increased production of sebum; however, combined with the elevated core temperature, increased perspiration and matted keratin preventing evaporation or mechanical removal, the bodily fluids combine into a viscous substance that binds laminar skin and keratinous matting. This occurs where bones come near the surface, most commonly along the spine.

  History

  In fourteenth-century Constantinople, an epidemic of Fictonecrosis brought the condition to the attention of European medicine. It is unfortunate that the first documented European cases were outlined in John Trimble and Rebecca M
anard’s disgraceful and sensationalist Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies; although it is true that Arctic and Antarctic explorers did on occasion consume printed materials such as reference works, navigational almanacs, and expedition journals, this should be viewed as in extremis survival measures, rather than as genuine cases of the malady.

  However, as John Trimble was the first Western practitioner to explicitly identify the condition, his diagnostic notes, although tragically flawed and suspiciously incomplete, have come into wide public circulation in periodicals that could politely be described as pornographic rubbish. It is for this reason that this entry eschews the term “Bibliophagia,” which is irrevocably associated with the sensationalist gutter press.

  Cures

  None known. A variety of treatments have been attempted with little success; most, such as those set out by Sarah Goodman in her disease journals, have focused upon psychotherapeutic techniques such as electroshock and primary aversion therapies. There is, however, a promising lead from the deployment of forensic techniques upon artifacts that have been rescued from the attentions of a fictonecrotic.

  Submitted by

  DR. MICHAEL BARRY, INSTITUTE OF PSYCHIATRIC VENEREOLOGY, HUGHES, AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY

  Cross References

  Bloodflower’s Melancholia; Diseasemaker’s Croup; Menard’s Disease; Printer’s Evil

  RAZORNAIL BONE ROT

  Bone Rot Bacterium (Novanguicula putrescossi)

  Country of Origin

  United States; possibly Northern Monterey County, Northern California; in particular, the range of the Ohlone Indians. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Wuhan Province in China might also be the origin of this bacterium.