Fantastic Metropolis

Dr. Lambshead: Do you recall Dr. Kimpira Tiramisu’s work with critics?

Dr. Cisco: What, you mean her work on cynicesura vitrolico?

Dr. Lambshead: Vitrolico? Your mind’s going. I was referring to specious rhadamanthemia—most likely “special group.”

Dr. Cisco: I’ll say it’s special, considering the long odds on such an extensive prenomial vector infection.

Dr. Lambshead: Oh, and vitrolico is more probable? Bulls’ pizzles!

Dr. Cisco: You’re the one who brought up Tiramisu in the first place! Did she work on rhadamanthemia? No! She worked on vitrolico!

Fantastic Metropolis: Doctors, if I might—

Dr. Lambshead: Tortescue! It was Tortescue who worked with vitrolico, you clown!

Dr. Cisco: A clown, am I? At least I can tell the difference between rhadamanthemia and what is obviously a widespread outbreak of anti-Quixotism.

Fantastic Metropolis: Doctors, please!

Dr. Lambshead: Another anti-disease. What a surprise. You’d diagnose the common cold as anti-dry-nose and then proclaim yourself the king of—

Dr. Cisco: Now that’s just typical. The medical establishment is blind as a cave fish whenever they question your findings, but just let someone else put something on the table without your blessed imprimatur stamped all over it, and it’s an auto-da-fé!

Dr. Lambshead: Interventionist!

Dr. Cisco: Inquisitor!

Dr. Lambshead: Lesion!

Dr. Cisco: Pus belch!

Fantastic Metropolis: Your faithful reporter regrets that the protocols of the interview—

Dr. Lambshead: Quackissimus!

Dr. Cisco: Dilettante!

Fantastic Metropolis:—have—watch it!—dissolved amid the sounds of breaking furniture. I will attempt—

(At this juncture, the reporter was compelled, due to the mountingly heated nature of the disagreement between these two Hippocratesian titans, swiftly and by means of certain measures intended to render his departure the more clandestine, absconded from the chamber. Consultation between the two physicians was not, we are given to understand, considerably further extended beyond this point.)

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The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases is available in bookstores now from Night Shade Books. It will be reprinted in the United Kingdom by Macmillan in November 2004.