ENTRY TAKEN FROM A

MEDICAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA
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, prefator 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

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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 wa into the

mind of the speaker and manifests itself in his flesh. It forces its
bearer to speak itself again and again, in the compan of others,
that the 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 the have heard, in curiosit or
mocker , if their utterance is just so, a wormword is hatched in their
heads. Not quite the parasite envisaged b m 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

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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 Gudluh. 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

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