An Interview with Dr. Lambshead
Fantastic Metropolis: By the time your faithful reporter could activate his tape recorder, the much-lionized Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead and his longtime colleague and dear friend, Dr. Michael Cisco, were already involved in a heated discussion of Paratygmatic Asystoly.
Dr. Lambshead: With all due respect, Dr. Phlegmose is utterly at sea with this transpholic ergocrine theory. It’s a tall pile of flapdoodle, believe me. Paratygmatic Asystoly is a simple infarction of callipygian bacteria. It responds beautifully to a regimen of hot cocoa and protopsychedelia. I mean, really, Dr. Cisco, what does that say to you?
Dr. Cisco: Apart from everyone loves cocoa, it doesn’t say anything to me but coo-coo. How can bacteria be the vector when the renorotor spectribs routinely come back with middle-infected vagancy? Your so-called pathogenic asystoly expresses every serial protein rib exchange classically characteristic of congenital defect.
Dr. Lambshead: Are you speaking German, Michael? I once knew a German conglomerate verb that receded to the horizon line and fell asleep.
Dr. Cisco: In any language, at least what I’m saying would make sense. Why, I myself—
Dr. Lambshead: A congenital defect that manifests only after consumption of overcooked boa constrictor flesh? Is that what you propose?
Dr. Cisco: Enzymes is enzymes is enzymes. Plainly there’s some sort of thermorphed enzymatic trigger.
Dr. Lambshead: Do little fairies appear in the bloodstream and turn the platelets inside out? Is that it?
Fantastic Metropolis: Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please sit down. My people at Fantastic Metropolis were hoping that Dr. Lambshead might consent to discuss the eighty-third edition of the Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Dr. Lambshead: What about it?
Dr. Cisco: Well, you’ve only just passed the editorial reins on to… you know, whozits and the other fellow.
Dr. Lambshead: VanderVere and Rogers. Something like that.
Dr. Cisco: And what do you think of what they call “the Guide’s new direction.”
Dr. Lambshead: Well, there certainly are a lot of illustrations this time. I’m not sure they’re what I’d call medical illustrations, but they’re certainly lurid. And there certainly are a lot of them.
Dr. Cisco: (under his breath) I really don’t understand all the nudity.
Dr. Lambshead: As for the content, I thought it rather skimpy. It’s roughly a quarter the size of the 2001 edition, and I can recite that one from memory.
Dr. Cisco: They wouldn’t take my abstract on anti-tanning. “409 pages is too long,” they said.
Fantastic Metropolis: By the way, what kind of sandwich was that again?
Dr. Lambshead: Crab salad. I brought it on myself, Michael. I told Vanderbert at the outset that the selection of material would be up to them. But I should never have signed that awful contract. I smelled a rat when that Robards kept talking about “going where the money is.”
Dr. Remnant: “Cash in before you old coots cash out,” was the phrase.
Dr. Lambshead: They seem to have ruthlessly excised all the research data to make space for wild anecdotes, as if the study of disease were some rare sexual perversity. What happened to the discussion of thoracic torque in relation to Ouroborean Lordosis?
Dr. Cisco: Cut.
Dr. Lambshead: And what about the sinew-spiral prehensile feces syndrome attendant on Pornstaller’s?
Dr. Cisco: “Wouldn’t connect with the youth market,” they said.
Dr. Lambshead: And how can an MD treat Internalized Tattooing without a dye ratio schematic and a chroma dial? Terrible omissions.
