NAME:Buscard’s Murrain, or Wormword
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Slovenia (probably).
FIRST KNOWN CASE: Primoz Jansa, a reader for a blind priest in the town of Bled in what is now northern Slovenia. In 1771 at the age of thirty-six Jansa left Bled for London. The first record of his presence there (and the first description of Buscard’s Murrain) is in a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Margaret Cocksedge dated 4th February 1774.[1]
SYMPTOMS: The disease incubates for up to three years, during which time the infected patient suffers violent headaches. After this, full-blown Buscard’s Murrain is manifested in slowly failing mental faculties and severe mood swings between three conditions: near full lucidity; a feverish seeking out of the largest audience possible; and a state of loud, hysterical glossolalia. Samuel Buscard infamously denoted these states torpid, prefatory and grandiloquent respectively, thereby appearing to take the side of the disease.
After between three and twelve years, the patient enters the terminal phase of the disease. The so-far gradual mental collapse speeds up markedly, leaving him or her in a permanent vegetative state within months.
Those present during the nonsensical “grandiloquence” of a murrain sufferer report that one particular word—the wormword—is repeated often, followed by a pause as the sufferer waits for a response. If any of those listening repeats the word, the sufferer’s satisfaction is obvious.
Later, it is from among these mimics that the next batch of the infected will be found.
HISTORY: At the insistence of the respected Dr. William Haygarth, all murrain sufferers were released into the care of Dr. Samuel Buscard in 1775.[2] During postmortem investigations on the brains of infected victims Buscard discovered what he thought were parasitic worms, which he named after himself. When a committee of aetiologists examined his evidence, they found that the vermiform specimens were made of cerebral matter itself. Buscard was denounced amid claims that he had made the “worms” himself by perforating the brains with a cheese-screw. The committee renamed the disease “gibbering fever,” and halfheartedly claimed it to be the result of “bad air.”
Samuel Buscard was ordered to surrender Jansa to the committee, but he produced papers showing that his patient had succumbed and been buried. The disgraced doctor then disappeared from public view and died in 1777.
His research was continued by his son Jacob, also a doctor. In 1782 Jacob Buscard astounded the medical establishment with the publication of his famous pamphlet proving that the brain-tissue “worms”
were capable of independent motion in the head, and that the cerebrums of sufferers were riddled with convoluted tunnels. “The first Dr. Buscard was thus correct,” he wrote. “Not bad air but a voracious parasite—a murrain— afflicts the gibberers.”
There is a word, which when spoken inveigles its way into the mind of the speaker and manifests itself in his flesh. It forces its bearer to speak itself again and again, in the company of others, that they might be tempted to echo it. With each utterance another wormword is born, until the brain is tunnelled quite through: and when those listening repeat what they have heard, in curiosity or mockery, if their utterance is just so, a wormword is hatched in their heads. Not quite the parasite envisaged by my wronged father, but a parasite nonetheless.[3]
Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet dates his revelation to 1780, during one of his numerous interrogations of Jansa in his “torpid” state. Jansa told Buscard that his illness had started one day while he was reading to his master in Bled. Between the pages of the book he had found a slip of paper on which was written two words. Jansa read the first word aloud, and thus started the earliest known outbreak of wormword.
His ensuing headache caused him to drop the paper, which was subsequently lost. “With the translation of those few letters into sound,” Jacob Buscard wrote, “the wretched Jansa became midwife and host to the wormword.” [4]
The younger Buscard’s breakthrough won him a tremendous reputation, marred by his admissions that he and his father had forged Jansa’s death certificate and kept him alive and imprisoned as an experimental subject for the past seven years. Jansa was found in the Buscard basement in the advanced stages of his disease and taken to a madhouse, where he died two months later. Jacob Buscard escaped prosecution for kidnapping, torture, and accessory to forgery by fleeing to Munich, where he disappeared.[5]
London suffered periodic outbreaks of Buscard’s murrain until the passage of the Gibbering Act of 1810 legalised the incarceration of the infected in soundproof sanatoria.[6] The era of mass infection was over, and only occasional isolated cases have been recorded since.
It took the late twentieth century and the work of Jacob Buscard’s great-great-great-great-great granddaughter Dr. Mariella Buscard conclusively to dispel the superstitious notions about “evil words” that have clouded even scholarly discussions of the disease. In her seminal 1995 Lancet article “It’s the Synapses, Stupid!”, the latest Dr. Buscard proves the murrain to be simply an unpleasant (though admittedly unusual) biochemical reaction.
She points out that with every action of the human body, including speech, a unique configuration of thousands of minute chemical reactions occurs in the brain. Dr. Buscard shows that when the wormword is spoken with a precise inflection, the concomitant synaptic firing has the unfortunate property of reconfiguring nerve-fibres into discrete self-organising clusters. The tiny chemical reactions, in other words, turn nerves into parasites. Boring through the brain and using their own newly independent bodies to reroute neural messages, these marauding lengths of brain matter periodically take control of their host.
They particularly affect his or her speech, in an attempt to fullfil their instincts to reproduce.
Following the format established in Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet, the wormword is traditionally rendered yGudluh. This is recorded with some trepidation: the main vector for the transmission of Buscard’s murrain over the last two centuries has been the literature about it.[7]
CURES: Randolph Johnson’s claims about bergamot oil in Confessions of a Disease Junkie are spurious: there is no known cure for Buscard’s murrain.[8] There is, however, persistent speculation that the second word on Jansa’s lost paper, if spoken, might engender some cure in the brain: perhaps a predatory “hunter” synapse to devour the wormwords. Several “Jansa’s papers” have appeared over the decades, all forgeries.[9] Despite numerous careful searches, Jansa’s paper remains lost.[10]
“I doubt not that you have heard of Mister Jansa— a fellow of lamentable aspect—who is daily seen around the squares of his adopted city where his intense bearing entices crowds of the curious; when surrounded the fellow excoriates ’em in obscure tongues such as would shame the most pious and ecstatic of quakers. Those gathered mock the afflicted with mummery. But horrors! A number of those who have mimicked poor Jansa have fallen to his brain-fever, and are now partners in his unorthodox ministry. ” (Kate Vinegar [ed], The London Letters of Ignatius Sancho [Providence 1954], p. 337.)
There is no record of Haygarth fraternising with or even mentioning Dr. Buscard before or after this time, and the reasons behind his 1775 recommendation are opaque. In his diaries, Haygarth’s assistant William Fin noted “a disparity between Dr. H’s words and his tone when he claimed Dr. Buscard as his very good friend ” (quoted in Marcus Gadd’s A Buscardology Primer [London 1972], p.iii). De Selby, in his unpublished “Notes on Buscard,” claims that Buscard was blackmailing Haygarth. What incriminating material he might have held on his more esteemed colleague remains unknown.
A Posthumous Vindication of Dr. Samuel Buscard: Proof That “Gibbering Fever” Is Indeed Buscard’s Murrain. (London 1782), p. 17.
Ibid., p. 25.
His last known letter (to his son Matthew) is dated January 1783, and contains a hint as to his plans.Jacob complains “I have not even the money to finish this. Carriage to Bled is a scandalous expense!” (Quoted in Ali Khamrein’sMedical Letters[New York 1966], p. 232.)
These notorious “Buscard Shacks” loom large in popular culture of the time. See for example the ballad “Rather the Poorhouse than a Buscard Shack” (reproduced in Cecily Fetchpaw’s Hanoverian Street Songs: Populism and Resistance [Pennsylvania 1988], p. 677).
Contrary to the impression given by the media after the 1986 Statten-Dogger incident, deliberate exposure to the risks of wormword is neither common nor new. Ully Statten was (no doubt unwittingly) continuing a tradition established in the late eighteenth century. In what could be considered a late Georgian extreme sport, London’s young rakes and coffee-house dandies would take turns reading the word aloud, each risking correct pronounciation and thereby infection.
This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Johnson’s work. The man is a liar, a fraud, and a bad writer (whose brother is Britain’s third-largest importer of bergamot oil).
There is a comprehensive list in Gadd, op. cit., p. 74.
“Years of Violent Ransacking Leave Slovenia’s Historic Churches in Ruins,” Financial Times, 3/7/85.