From Booklist
What do a passel of brainy, witty sf and dark fantasy writers do to amuse themselves (and, hopefully, us)? Like any gathering of old friends, they talk about diseases. Fortunately, not their own diseases (although several entries in this dictionary-format guide bear the editorial warning that the authors seem to be suffering the illness at hand) but maladies they have, in their capacities as "doctors," discovered (i.e., made up). So doing, they follow the lead of strange-disease sleuth Thackery Trajan Lambshead (b. 1900), who published his findings annually from 1921 until this year, when, feeling he had only 30 good years left, he turned the work over to editors VanderMeer and Roberts and their "doctor" acquaintances, such as Neil Gaiman, Kage Baker, Michael Moorcock, Gahan Wilson, Alan Moore, Neil Williamson, and other regular denizens of the SF/Fantasy and Graphic Novel sections of this magazine. Perfect recreational reading, at least for hypochondriacs, who will bask in the assurance that they don't have, say, "motile snarcoma," "third-eye infection," or "Inverted Drowning syndrome." Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Publishers Weekly, August 18, 2003
An amazing book...sure to delight the discerning (and slightly warped) reader.

The Complete Review, August
"Fun and cleverness can be found at every turn. Enjoyable!"

The Complete Review, August
"Fun and cleverness can be found at every turn. Enjoyable!"

Book Description
First "published" in 1915, as World War I raged through Europe, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases was for thirty years disseminated to doctors around the world in the form of loose-leaf carbon copies and photocopies. In 1945, London’s Chatto & Windus published the first formal edition of the Guide. Twenty editions later, the Guide was discontinued, but continued to be updated by Dr. Lambshead and his colleagues and privately printed by friends. From Freetown to Istanbul, Timbuktu to Ulan Bator, it has proven its worth under less than ideal conditions. When a doctor lost in the Congo rainforests with only a few antibiotics and feral pigmy elephants for company cannot diagnose his odd spinal condition, he reaches for his handy copy of the Guide. When a family practice doctor cannot understand why a patient of 30 years with no history of mental defect suddenly begins to mimic inanimate objects, she turns to the reliable Lambshead Pocket Guide. Now that the Lambshead Pocket Guide will once again be publicly published, Dr. Lambshead, well over one hundred years of age, has decided to pass the editorship of the Guide on to the capable if rather young, in the good doctor’s opinion, hands of Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. Although Dr. Lambshead will continue to monitor the influx of documentation regarding new diseases, he will leave the day-to-day editorial duties to VanderMeer and Roberts, both able doctors in their own right.

From the Publisher
The book is being supported by readings at Borders and other bookstores in major cities, as well as lots of advertising.

From the Author
"Mentioned in whispers for decades; burned in Manchuria; worshipped in Peru; the only book to be listed on the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum twice, for emphasis; available again at last, in this definitive edition. Welcome to the Lambshead Guide. Disease-mongers, shudder." -- Dr. China Miéville "Now you will discover what imaginary doctors have known for decades: when confronted with the unlikely, turn to Lambshead. It will tell you exactly what not to do." -- Dr. Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom "In a world in which The Almighty, with limitless imagination and boundless perversity, delights in bedeviling physicians with the concoction of ever more bizarre maladies, the Lambshead Guide stands out, with all the gravitas of an impacted colon, like a lighthouse whose beam illuminates the bitter night of Ignorance and leads us back to the sweet ether of Scientific reason." -- Dr. Jeffrey Ford, author of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque "A must-read for every student of medicine. It should be required reading in medical school and residency, to bring back the perspective of humor—and the humor of perspective—to our oh-so-serious profession. We all were once creative dreamers in another life." -- Dr. Mark Shamis, M.D.

Excerpted from The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases: Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases by Jeff Vandermeer, Tim Lebbon, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MOTILE SNARCOMA Motile Agglutinate Snarcoma of the Subperineal Pondus Countries of Origin Oncologists have identified this uncommon fibroid tumor in several of the industrial nations. The etiology of snarcoma remains unknown, although anecdotal evidence gathered by the American Congress For Cancer links the malignancy with compulsive eating of spent paper matches. First Known Case In 1921, Mr. Lumpur Kos, a flax dyer of Khulna, Bengal, developed an aggressive snarcoma which is now a treasured specimen in the permanent collection of the Provisional Pathology Museum of the Audrey Nickers Memorial Teaching Hospital of Bombay. Symptoms Prior to ultrasound readings and exploratory biopsy, the diagnosis of snarcoma hinges on somatic indicators such as shortness of breath, flocculence of the urine, running sores of the nasal procus, bleeding from the ears, prolonged epiductoid olomony of the distal grottum, spitting, fainting spells, intrafusile vomiting, and adhesive bed sores. Treatment Pondal snarcoma can be surgically excised with great success, but is often treated chemically as a second choice, for no better reason than that the attending surgeon "couldn’t find the pondus." This situation is inexcusable. Surgical Procedure After a standard transcolonic approach to the postpubic oversum has been established, the first and third inguinal veins and the fontiform lymphatic spinkos can be distended ventrally using a pair of Vega’s lateral forceps, thus exposing the purple infoldings of the pylophancus or organ of Gorki. Dissect the porensic artery, slice it diagonally, and insert 30 centimeters of sterile latex shunt.Apply your Forke’s scalpel to the juncture of the pylophancus with the yellowish lobar tabuclomen. Expect copious drainage of Cowlick’s fluid into the surgical field. Have plenty of suction tubes on hand. They tend to clog. Slocotomize and displace the tabuclomen by a succession of deepening incisions. Now you can utilize your perforated elbow retractor (1) to draw aside the main prutenoid mass of the pylophancus. This procedure should provide access to the pondus and its snarcomal extrusion. Grip the snarcoma firmly in the jaws of a pair of Poker’s tongs. Use Benway shears to snip the tumor free from the pondus. Drop the extracted snarcoma into a steel basin of saline.Now here’s where the procedure can get a bit hectic. You may withdraw your tongs and find only a scrap of the snarcoma in its jaws. Pondal snarcomas are known to sacrifice pieces of them selves in order to avoid capture.And that’s the least of their little tricks. Your snarcoma may turn out to be a motile snarcoma. A motile snarcoma exhibits mobility under stress. In layman’s terms, it can crawl. In fact, it will stretch out its fibrous mycelia like tentacles and drag itself around your patient’s guts like a beached baby octopus on Benzedrine. It may suddenly hide behind a kidney. If you flush it out again, it may head for the small intestines. At all costs keep it away from the intestines. Hunting it down in there makes a terrible mess.As a last resort, it may even fling itself from the abdominal cavity. I have personally retrieved two snarcomas from the floors of operating theaters. (One of them went safely from a butterfly net into a preserving jar. My nurse stepped on the other. An accident, or so she said.)In any case, a snarcoma can’t survive in the wild. Just keep it away from any patients with open body cavities who might be nearby, and it will die a natural death.When the snarcoma is under control, examine the surgical field for corruption and use Plook’s tweezers to extract any glybolic granulation. Disclevature or oblation of the hemophragmic orphule typically indicates opportunistic inspusal of the peripheral mesencrum by infragort C-cells. Be aware that mumblision of the cocapsular endosucrament can eventuate in slethonular blucoposis. Submitted by Dr. Stepan Chapman