Word: munchausenisms
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...recitation of their histories as "organ recitals." Other somatizers sometimes deliberately fake illness, going so far, for example, as to rub a thermometer on a bedsheet to produce a fever, lacerate the skin to create lesions, or overuse laxatives to disrupt the gastrointestinal tract. In the bizarre Munchausen syndrome, which, according to one estimate, affects 4,000 U.S. patients, ailments are feigned so that the individual can enter the hospital. One man was so skillful at complaining about his abdominal pain, vomiting and seizures that he was hospitalized more than 400 times and submitted to 102 gastrointestinal tests...
...incurable hospital addict. In the past 34 years he has been admitted at least 207 times to 68 different hospitals in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales for a breathtaking variety of diseases and disorders. Indeed Mcllroy seems beyond doubt to be the alltime champion sufferer of Munchausen's syndrome...
...estimable Ernest M. Frimbo is the Baron Munchausen of railroads, with a puff of Lucius Beebe and a chuff of Cervantes thrown in. Frimbo-the "world's greatest railroad buff'-is the brain child of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who has himself bumpety-thumped across 2,334,000 miles of rails from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Ill. By inventing Frimbo-lexicographer, gourmet, jazz fan, connoisseur of contessas and, of course, compulsive investigator of trains-Whitaker has transmuted what might have been a soda-water sermon on the glory and decline of the trains into a Jules Vernean adventure that...
...protests a bit too much, implying that after the flood of words already published about the famous fabricated "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, only Clifford Irving, the famous fabricator, can tell the true story. To believe the confessions of Clifford Irving is a little like believing the confessions of Baron Munchausen; yet he tells his tale with a certain bravado. And one may satisfy a morbid interest by watching a man who could write his way into so much trouble (a prison sentence of 2½ years and debts of about $1 million) trying to write his way out again...
...More powerful than Abbie Hoffman! Faster on the guff than Bella Abzug! Able to leap Baron Munchausen in a single bound! It's Supercop Jack Muller, the Chicago letter-of-the-law man who for 25 years has been causing pain and embarrassment to that city's politicians, smug elite and privileged hoodlums...