Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The Doctor Versus the Collector

For the majority of his career, due to his insistence on remaining true to his main passions, Lambshead existed on the fringes of medical science. He was wellrespected by some of the world’s best doctors, but it was only by becoming a kind of cult figure in the 1960s and 1970s, when he forged friendships with many of pop culture’s elite, along with “sheer bloody persistence and endurance,” that his medical exploits began to receive the media attention he believed they deserved. Later on, there would even be factions of Lambsheadologists who clashed in their interpretations of the doctor’s theories, with Lambshead rarely if ever willing to put an end to such conflict with a definitive conclusion. “Definitive conclusions are for politicians, proctologists, and those who wear mascot costumes,” he liked to say.

Despite the time spent on his cabinet, Lambshead’s interests always manifested most concretely in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases . First published in 1921, the Guide gave agency and credence to real but obscure and often only anecdotally documented instances of diseases, parasites, and tumors. Not only did many young doctors from all over the world, who would later publish influential findings, receive a sympathetic welcome from the doctor, but marginalized peoples often found the Guide took up their cause, sometimes creating publicity for situations that local governments and foreign-relief agencies wished would just go away.

Published almost continuously until the doctor’s death, the Guide received a controversial send-off with Bantam Books’ commemorative eighty-third edition in 2003. That reviewers and readers were often confused as to whether the book constituted fact or fiction was the result of a colossal blunder by Bantam’s marketing and PR departments, which were, as would be well documented later, largely dominated by pot-smokers. However, the doctor’s legacy was vindicated by the fact that a large number of medical libraries now carry that edition in their medical-guides section.

Legendary Czech artist and animator Jan Svankmajer's tongue-in-cheek tribute to Dr. Lambshead’s so-called “Skull Cucumber” hoax, perpetrated on London’s Museum of Natural History in 1992, during as Lambshead put it, “a period of extreme boredom.”

However, as should be clear, the doctor’s career was only half the story. Just as his exploration of eccentric diseases forms a secret history of the twentieth century, so, too, his cabinet of curiosities, in all of its contradictions, provides an eclectic record of a century—through folly and triumph, organized, if you will, by the imaginations of the eccentric and the visionary.

Resurrecting the Cabinet

Not until well after Lambshead’s death of banal pulmonary failure did anyone except for his housekeeper seem to have had even an inkling of the full extent of the underground collection. This situation had been exacerbated by the old man’s knowledge of his impending extinction. He had, for three years, been issuing a “recall” of sorts on many of his permanent loans. (This fact did not go unnoticed by Kiernan, who claimed these particular exhibits “had expired in their usefulness for communication with Helen.”)

A long process of discovery awaited those assigned by the estate to take care of the house, which still begs the question: Why did it take so long to unearth the collection? Estate representatives have been vague on this point, perhaps hinting at some private foreknowledge and personal plundering prior to the British government, in 2008, declaring the property a national treasure—nothing was to be touched, except with extreme care, and certainly nothing removed.

But it is also true that Lambshead had left enough aboveground to keep archaeologists and appraisers busy for several lifetimes. In later years, Lambshead’s housekeeper had gotten lackadaisical, and Lambshead made eccentric purchases of furniture—which, the week before his death, he’d hired movers to stack against the front door, as if to barricade the house against what he must have known by then was coming.

An invention commissioned from Jake von Slatt demonstrating the doctor’s commitment to the future as well as the past. Some have speculated this device supports Amal El-Mohtar’s “space Ark” theory. As described by Annalee Newitz, this image “illustrates an ideal system, where the knobs on the lower right demodulate cultural transmissions, and the amplifier beneath the bell transmits a psionic signal that can reach any analog neurological entity within 7,000 kilometers.” (See Newitz’s extended description in the Catalog section.)

More evidence of the disarray of the cabinet space, in a photograph taken during a 2009 appraisal. (Found in the display case at the back, a half-finished letter penned by Lambshead: “As Lichtenberg said of angels, so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God’s name should we understand? And even if so, how then should we reply?”)

Therefore, the man’s house was in a catastrophic state of disarray, with letters from heads of state mixed in with grocery lists, major medical awards propping up tables or sticking enigmatically out of the many cat litter boxes, and several hundred volumes of his personal journals shoved into random spaces in a library as shambolic as it was complete. The only clean, uncluttered space was Helen’s study, which remained as it had been upon her death.

No doubt because of this disarray, and the introduction of an administrative red herring—Moorcock has suggested that Lambshead left instructions for someone to “plant the herring, no matter how badly it might begin to smell”—indicating that the collection had long ago been sent into storage in Berlin, it took caretakers until last year to unearth perhaps “the most stirring find,” as Le Monde put it. In the basement space, lost under a collapsed floor, were found the remains of a “remarkable and extensive cabinet of curiosities” that “appeared to have been damaged by a fire that occurred sometime during the past decade.” ( Le Monde, “Une merveille médicale: Le curieux cabinet d’un médecin renommé enflamme l’imagination,” April 14, 2010) Strangely, there is no report of any fire from the many years Lambshead owned the house, and we have only a brief anecdotal (and probably false) statement from the doctor’s estranged housekeeper to guide us to any sort of conclusion.

The cabinet of curiosities took more than eighteen months to unearth, reconstruct, document, and catalog. Many of the pieces related to anecdotes and stories in the doctor’s personal diaries. Others, when shown to his friends, elicited further stories. In many cases, we had only descriptions of the items. Still, we were determined to build a book that would honor at least the spirit and lingering ghost of Lambshead’s collection. Thus, in keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Lambshead and his accomplishments, we are now proud to present highlights from the doctor’s cabinet. These have been reconstructed not just through visual representations but also through text associated with their history and (sometimes) their acquisition by Lambshead. (As with any cabinet, real or housed within pages, it is, as Oscar Wilde once said about an exhaustive collection of poetry, a “browsing experience, to dip into and to savor, rather than take a wild carriage ride through.”)