Thackery T. Lambshead

Thackery T. Lambshead, author of

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

   *”Thackery Trajan Lambshead was born on St. Genesius the Comedian’s Day (August 25th), 1900, in Wimering on the Brink, Devon (county), England. He was the second of seven children born to Casper and Eucaria Lambshead, although a putative resemblance between Thackery and one Neb Gariad, an itinerant glass blower and sin-eater who passed through Devon late in 1899, has been the cause of some rather pointless gossip. Casper Lambshead served his community as a notary public and importer and retailer of monkey-picked teas (although his father had run a traveling medicine show). Eucaria, who had enjoyed some minor success on the stage, gave voice lessons and raised owls. A mediocre student with a penchant for marbles and catching frogs, Thackery proved to be a late bloomer. His interest in medicine crystallized in 1913, when his mother was struck in the head with a petrified sponge belonging to Kimball’s Curiosities, which had accidentally been displaced from its temporary situation on a third-floor windowsill overlooking the street in a moment of mental abstraction on the part of Mr. Rearben Kimball, Jr. The resulting injury, while not life threatening, brought on a case of classic amnesia from which Eucaria Lambshead never recovered—and neither did her son. He put aside his ambition to appear in silent films and, largely by mere force of will, got himself admitted to Oxford Medical College.

   Thackery later confessed to Sterling Silliphant that he passed through his remarkably rapid medical training in “a brown study.” Intense, somber, indefatigable, and seemingly immune to the lure of the ordinary student dissipations, he graduated in 1918, easily the most generally resented graduate in the history of that institution (perhaps the fatuous rumors involving Lambshead in an infernal bargain originated at this time—however they began, he has never entirely been able to shake them). His reception among the staff at Combustipol General Hospital, back in Devon, was far warmer, and, during his internship there, his mood correspondingly improved. A lifelong pacifist, he elected, in late 1919, to tend veterans at the St. Agnes Charity Clinic of Edinburgh, as his Whitmanesque way of contributing to what he called the “post-War effort.” There was, at this time, some expectation of marriage (the details are impossible to trace), which met with an abrupt and bitterly disillusioning reverse, and this, perhaps, was at least in part, to blame for Lambshead’s decision to leave England for a time. The tendency to bury any possibility of a private life in an unremitting application to his work would be one of the only constants in his eventful life. He traveled to India, where he established his first and only private practice: the work bored him, and he made use of his spare time to pursue all manner of projects, from public works and choreography for the Salvation Army Modern Dance Society, to the accumulation of medical documents of a generally abstruse and obscure character. It is out of this later pastime that the Guide was born.

   Lambshead took advantage of an offer to serve as court physician to Prince Varchambara of Nagchampabad—the position afforded considerable free time, and the Prince’s libraries were vast—and he produced the first formal collection-draught within six months. This was not simply a matter of collating materials, but also, most crucially, of developing a methodology for their evaluation. Forced to abandon his post within the year, due to an imbroglio with one of the Prince’s wives, Lambshead, now completely dedicated to the perfection of his guide, moved to Berlin.

   Berlin in the 1920s was a heady place, an anarchic hubbub of possibilities: in addition to his extensive research in the medical archives of that city, Lambshead also had ample opportunity to contribute materials based on his own eyewitness accounts. Indeed, some entries were written on the very spot of discovery, in the presence of the victim, as was the case with Erotomotor Pseudalgia and 139 Hauptstrasse Explosive Plumagnetism, the later named for the street address adjacent to which the known attack took place (the subject’s body erupted in iron feathers and elaborately-pigmented wattles in Dr. Lambshead’s presence—as the plumage was highly magnetic, the patient was able to walk only in the direction of magnetic north). Aggravated Inguinal Palsy was provided to Dr. Lambshead by the real Mata Hari (not the pasty who was executed in her place), whom he met by chance in the back parlor of The Black Cube Club. In his travels throughout Europe, Lambshead visited nearly every major city on the continent, and a great many of the more out-of-the-way spots as well, combing even monastic records for evidence of unknown ailments.

   In 1928, after a brief stint in hospital (not due to illness: having encountered Antonin Artaud in the streets of Paris, and rather foolishly slapping him in the face with the injunction, in English, to “Snap out of it.” Dr. Lambshead found himself at the mercy of the irate actor’s horny knuckles). Lambshead set off on the first of his many African expeditions. He left Europe I a huff, after receiving an endless series of obtuse rejection letters from all the major medical and even commercial publishing houses he had approached with the Guide. “Book publishers are the most infernally slow and pachydermously unimaginative race ever to blast the surface of the earth!” he wrote to Andreas Embirikos. : A pox on those turquoise devils!”

   Lambshead spent much of the 1930s infatuated with Madagascar, where he wrote the now classic “Treatise on Trans-species Human-Lemur Pyrethroblastastosis and Emittomatism, or Crater Flatulence his own peculiar strain of antibiotic vanilla. His idyllic, If solitary, life on the cliffs overlooking Madagascar’s otherworldly beaches was disrupted by rumors of war: his only college friend, John Trimble, who had been secretly employed by Winston Churchill to spy on the Germans, warned of the impending conflict, and Lambshead decided to return to England and make his services available there…“

 *from the foreword, by the editors Dr. Jeff VanderMeer and Dr. Mark Roberts

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

   First "published" in 1915, as World War I raged through Europe, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases was for years disseminated to doctors around the world in the form of loose-leaf carbon copies and photocopies.

   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.

Name: Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead
Archetype: Scientist
Player: Bruceifer
Motivation: Truth

Age: 36
Height: 5'10"
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black
Skin: Fair

BODY: 2
DEX: 2
STR: 2
CHA: 2
INT: 4
WILL: 3

SIZE: 0
MOVE: 4
PERCEPTION: 7
INITIATIVE: 6
DEFENSE: 4
STUN: 2

Skills; Base+Levels=Rating

Science/biology: 4+3=7
Craft/medicines: 4+3=7
Medicine: 4+3=7
Linguistics: 4+1=5
Science/engineering: 4+3=7
Craft/mechanics: 4+3=7
Demolitions: 4+1=5
Firearms: 2+1=3
Athletics: 2+1=3
Brawl: 2+1=3
Drive: 2+0=2
Empathy: 4+0=4
Stealth: 2+0=2

Talents:

Wierd Science

Resources:

Artifact 0(stun pistol)

Flaws:

Absent-minded

Extra Languages:

German
Latin
Hindi