The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The most popular of other apocryphal theories originated with the performance artist Sam Van Olffen, who, since 1989, has seemed fixated on Lambshead and staged several related productions. The most grandiose, the musical The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead, debuted in 2008 in Paris and London, well after Lambshead’s death. Perhaps the most controversial of Van Olffen’s speculations is that Lambshead’s excavations in 1962 were meant not to create a space for a cabinet of curiosities but to remodel an existing underground space that had previously served as a secret laboratory in which he was conducting illegal medical tests. A refrain of “Doctor doctor doctor doctor! / Whatcher got in there there? A lamb’s head?” is particularly grating.

Certainly, nothing about the flashback scenes to the 1930s, or the hints of Lambshead’s affiliation with underground fascist parties, did anything to endear Van Olffen’s productions to fans of the doctor, or the popular press. The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities closed on both Les Boulevards and the West End after less than a month. The combined effect of media attention for this “sustained attack on the truth,” as Lambshead’s heirs put it in a deposition for an unsuccessful lawsuit in 2009, has been to distort the true nature of the doctor’s work and career.

A Deep Emotional Attachment?

Despite irregularities and bizarre claims, one fact seems clear: Lambshead, especially in his later years, formed a deep emotional attachment to many of the objects in his collection, whether repatriated, loaned out, or retained in his house or underground cabinet.

A close friend of Lambshead, post–World War II literary icon Michael Moorcock, who first met the doctor in the mid-1950s at a party thrown by Mervyn Peake's family, remembered several such attachments to objects. “It became especially acute in the 1960s,” Moorcock recalled in an interview, “when we spent a decent amount of time together because of affairs related to New Worlds,” the seminal science fiction magazine Moorcock edited at the time. “For a man of science, who resolutely believed in fact, he could be very sentimental. I remember how distraught he became during an early visit when he couldn’t find an American Night Quilt he had promised to show both me and [J. G.] Ballard. He became so ridiculously agitated that I had to say, ‘Pard, you might want to sit down awhile.’ Then he felt compelled to tell me that he and his first—his only—wife, Helen, who had passed on two or three years before, had watched the stars from the roof one night early in their relationship, and had snuggled under that quilt. One of his fondest memories of her.” (Independent, “An Unlikely Friendship?: The Disease Doc and the Literary Lion,” September 12, 1995)

One of Sam Van Olffen’s stage sets for the supposed laboratory of Dr. Lambshead, taken from the Parisian production of the musical The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead and supposedly inspired by Van Olffen’s own encounter with the cabinet several years before. (Le Monde, March 2, 2008)

The “secret medical laboratory” stage set for The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead. A much less grandiose version of the musical was eventually turned into a SyFy channel film titled Mansquito 5: Revenge of Dr. Lambshead, but never aired. (Le Monde, March 2, 2008)

One of Lambshead’s few attempts at art, admittedly created “under the influence of several psychotropic drugs I was testing at the time.” Lambshead claims he was “just trying to reproduce the visions in my head.” S. B. Potter (see: “1972” in Visits and Departures) claimed the painting provided “early evidence of brain colonization.”

A fair number of the artifacts in the cabinet dating from before 1961 would have reminded Lambshead of Helen Aquilus, a brilliant neurosurgeon whom he appears to have first met in 1939, courted until 1945, and finally married in 1950 (despite rumors of a chance encounter in 1919). She had accompanied him on several expeditions and emergency trips, as a colleague and fellow scientist. She had been present when Lambshead acquired many of his most famous artifacts, such as “The Thing in the Jar,” a puzzler that haunted Lambshead until his death (see: Further Oddities). She also helped him acquire a number of books, including a rare printing of Gascoyne’s Man’s Life Is This Meat. Some have, in fact, suggested that Lambshead turned toward the preservation of his collection and building of a space for it as a distraction from his grief following Helen’s death in an auto accident on a lonely country road in 1960.