Medicine Show is set is Europe in the aftermath of World War I, and follows the adventures of Professor Bernhard Freedomhowler's Internationally Acclaimed Traveling Exhibition of Medicinal Wonderment: a medicine show featuring a highly unusual troupe of players, including Norris the reluctantly heroic Dog-Man; a six-foot-seven, four-hundred-pound horse goddess named Heather; the immortal sharpshooter Dan "Doc" Evans; Grenadine, the medium of questionable ability; and Calliope the Whistle-Pig. In these twelve chapters, the book's twelve authors have concocted a complex brew of (among other things) firebreathing impresarios, post-war devastation, werewolves, Nordic Gods, bizarre plots, and slapstick comedy.

The Liquid Laughter Project was a collaborative writing project in which twelve authors, given a set of characters and a premise, wrote a full-length novel in the round-robin style, with each author producing one chapter per month. Medicine Show is the first volume of the project, and was written over the time period of May 2005 to May 2006. The second volume, Freedomhowler, Finchley, and Co., was written from November 2006 to November 2007.