Word: munchausen
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Salvation a la Munchausen. The first of them began in 1905 in Budapest. His father was a promoter and would be inventor who soon struck it rich with a "radioactive" soap. His mother was a hysteric who blew hot & cold until little Arthur had emotional chilblains. To make bad worse, Arthur turned out to be unusually short, yet something of a child prodigy too, "admired for my brains and detested for my character by children and teachers alike." He had little home training in the Jewish faith of his fathers, and early in life his belief in a personal...
...Like all gifted men, Colonel* Pearson has a few failings . . . President Roosevelt [called him] a 'chronic liar.' I can't go quite that far. Colonel Pearson sometimes tells the truth . . . It may not be intentional, but it's there . . . I estimate that Baron Munchausen's contemporary counterpart has told no less than two dozen lies about me within the past two years. Assuming I have received only my pro rata share of Baron Pearson's prevarications, this data may be projected to the conclusion that this modern Munchausen has concocted 24 falsehoods about every...
Elsie (nobody knows her true name) is a typical sufferer from what Dr. Asher calls the "Munchausen syndrome," after the famed yarn-spinning baron. Her kind troops from hospital to hospital in psychopathic search of drama and attention. The Elsies, says Dr. Asher, often "seem to gain nothing except . . . discomfiture . . . Their initial tolerance to the more brutish hospital measures is remarkable, yet they commonly discharge themselves after a few days with operation wounds scarcely healed . . . Their effrontery is sometimes formidable, and they may appear many times at the same hospital. hoping to meet a new doctor on whom to practice...
What makes the Elsies hard to spot is the fact that their pretended symptoms are generally rooted in some real lesion from the past. Two almost certain signs of the Munchausen syndrome: an abdomen full of scars and a handbag stuffed with hospital attendance records...
...King" tells it, in a lively stylistic blend of Baron Munchausen and Dan Turner, Private Eye, the Harvard job was really an accident. He had come to Boston to knock over a Liggett drug store, but after casing the joint he vetoed...