Part One: The Goat Testicle Implanting Doctor Who Invented Talk Radio

In episode 65, Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss John Brinkley, who was obsessed with goat testicles. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what lubing my slipping slides? I'm Robert Evans. This
is Behind the Masters, the show where every week I
talk about a new terrible person and and try a
new terrible introduction to try and get a reaction from
my guests. Caitlin Duranti, how are you? How are you
feeling about that one who's lubin up your slipping slide?

(00:20):
Is that what you said? Yeah, that was the intro. Yeah,
well I would I liked it. To me, whoever's loubing
up your slipping slide is a good person, because you
want your slipping slide nice and lubed. Oh yeah, otherwise
you'll get some real bad tears. Yeah, you're you don't
want those tears, those slipping slide tears. So you're gonna
want that lube. And I still want to know who

(00:44):
is doing it? Okay, so you're asking me who loubes
my slipping slide? It's it's more like a like a
question I'm asking the universe. Aren't we all wondering on
some level what's loubing our slipping slides? I want to
tell you specific wickly, who is louping my slipping slide? Though,

(01:04):
just kidding but it is Nicholas whole star of um
you know some movies Mad Max, Yup Tolkien, which I
won't see, actually I will anyway. That's in a way,
Nicholas Holt is loving all of our slipping slides. I
think that's beyond a doubt. You're not wrong, You're not wrong.

(01:24):
I'm not wrong. So, Caitlin, I've already introduced you by name,
but you want to plug some plug doubles before we
get into the episode today, I'd love to. I'm a comedian.
I am the co host of the Bechtel Cast, which
is another podcast right here on this darn network. And

(01:45):
uh yeah, that's about it. M hm. And you were
with me to talk about l Ron Hubbard. Uh last year,
A very good time talking about that. And now we're
talking about a different but almost as ambitious grifter. Oh
I love the ambitious ones. Oh yeah, yeah, this guy,
this guy motherfucking ambition coming out the wazoo and the

(02:10):
shadow of a doubt. Yeah, if if ambition was a
slip and slide, this guy would be lubing that slip
and slide up like you would not believe. Right on.
Have you ever heard of John Brinkley I have not
have you ever heard of goat testicles, um, just as
a general thing, as a concept that exists. I'm familiar

(02:33):
with testicles and goats, and by proxy, I am familiar
with the idea that goats would have testicles, some of
them now, And and I understand you're not gonna have
an exact number here, Caitlin, but would you venture to
guess how many times you've heard the phrase goat testicles
in your life up to this point, not counting the
two times I brought it up so far, I would say,

(02:55):
like exactly that phrase, or even just like a variation
on like goatballs or any sort of yet direct reference
to the to the testicular glands of a goat. Honestly,
it's more than you think, because, if memory serves, goats
have enormous testicles in relation to their So I feel
like I've been to like different petting zoos and people

(03:17):
have like commented on goatball. So I feel like I've
heard some variation on it, maybe like ten times throughout
my life. Ten times. If that's the case, then I
suspect for you, and for most of our listeners, you
are about to hear the phrase goat testicles more than
you've ever heard it before in your entire life. Yeah,
I'm very excited for this. John Romulus Brinkley came into

(03:41):
this world on July eighth, in the year of Our
Lord eight five. His father, John Richard Brinkley, was a
former medic in the Confederate Army. His mother, Sarah Burnett,
was the niece of his dad's fourth wife, which is
a chain of parentage that is best not contemplated too deeply.
When John was five, his mother died. His father died
when he was ten, and John was raised by his

(04:01):
aunt's Sally. He grew up in Jackson County, North Carolina.
It seems to have been a rather ambitious child. He
recalled later that he grew up dreaming of John Brinkley
freeing the slaves, John Brinkley illuminating the world, John Brinkley
facing an assassin's bullet for the sake of his people.
John Brinkley healing the sick. Can I stop you right there? Yes,
I'm sorry. His middle name is Romulus, okay, like the

(04:26):
guy who killed his brother to make Rome right. Okay.
For some reason, I am like, oh, that's a star
trek thing. I don't know enough about history, as you
can tell. It's possible that they were just anticipating Star
Trek's second or third best villain species, but more likely
it was a reference to Roman mythology. Okay, I suppose

(04:50):
that tracks Yeah, I would. I would say that's more likely.
His neighbors recall him being quote kind of a reckless
like boy who was ively as a cricket, because again
it was old timey days and people said ship like
lively as a cricket. Uh. John's education was not up
to snuff with his ambitions. By the age of sixteen,
he'd been forced to leave school and get a job.

(05:12):
He worked first as a mailman and then as a
telegraph operator. This job moved him to New York and
then to New Jersey. It seemed like he was on
the path for a decent, middle class life, but then
at his aunt mom Sally died and he was forced
to return to Jackson County to settle her affairs. His
aunt aunt mom, right, Yeah, I mean his aunt who

(05:33):
raised him. So okay, I'm his aunt mom. Okay, I
was still I'm a little confused on who the parent
relatives are. Yeah, and like which how much incest did happen.
But well, it's confusing because his actual mom is the
niece of his dad's wife, his dad's ex wife, which

(05:54):
I think makes his real mom his aunt mom too,
So right, confusing. Yeah, I'm not going to try to
understand it. It's it's best not to try to parse
that out too deeply. Now. While he was back in
Jackson County dealing with his aunt his second aunt Mom's funeral,
he met an old firm from school named Sally wilke H.

(06:16):
Now that they were both mature adults, they started vibing
off one another and then fucking, and then one month
after Aunt Sally's death, they got married. Wife Sally understood
her husband's unrequited ambition to get into medicine. She told
him that he didn't need to waste a bunch of
time in medical school to become a doctor. This was true. Yeah, yeah.
In the in the late eighteen nineties, every state government

(06:36):
saved three in the United States had repealed licensing laws
for doctors. This was due to a populist movement that
had swept the country against the idea of high falutin
educations and licenses, things that were seen as taking power
from the common man, the way many people felt, why
shouldn't anyone be able to declare themselves a doctor for
any reason? Um? So that's that's sort of where things

(06:57):
were in the light. You're down with that. I'm done
with that. Too too much education out there, Let's scale
it back. I'm having a bunch of hats printed up
right now that just say, make every American a doctor again. Um.
I think that'll that'll that'll deal with the problem of
not enough good jobs and the student loan problem. It's
really like a silver bullet for a couple of like

(07:17):
our healthcare crisis, our debt crisis. Just make everybody a doctor, right,
I have I have so much student loan debt, and
I it needs so much medical attention. I don't know
what to do about any of it. Well, and if
you don't know how much student loan debt you have,
but if you look at whatever that number is and
then declare yourself a doctor, I'm gonna bet it seems
a lot more reasonable. That's true because if I have

(07:38):
the income of a doctor that you know, seventy thousand
dollars and I, oh, that's pocket change for a doctor.
That's nothing. Yeah, a shitty doctor will make twice that
in the year. This is a solid plan. Yes, um, anyway.
At around this point in late eighteen nineties, a teacher
named Lemuel Shattuck was asked by the Massachusetts state legislature

(08:01):
to carry out a survey of the state sanitary and
medical facilities during this period. His summary of the state
of Massachusetts sanitary facilities is pretty accurate for sort of
the state of of medical education in most of the
U S at the time. Anyone male or female, learned
or ignorant an honest manner and nave can assume the
name of physician and practice upon anyone to cure or

(08:22):
to kill, as either may happen without accountability. It's a
free country. Wait to cure or to kill? Yeah, okay, Um,
so doctors, our response should be killing people, is what
they're saying. Doctors shouldn't be held to a high standard
of not killing people. They should be able to do

(08:43):
whatever they want, because anyone should be a doctor. Yes,
this is this is a real thing. That was a
popular line of thought in America at the time. Good, okay, now,
John Brinkley, Yeah, pretty presently with his his new wife's
advice became doctor John Brinkley. Now this was not he
was not a doctor obviously in any like licensed sense
of the word. But he started traveling around and acting

(09:05):
as what was known as a Quaker doctor. Um. This
was sort of a meme in America at this point.
And I'm going to quote from the book Charlatan by
Pope Brock to explain what exactly was going on there. Quote.
There was a set pattern to most Quaker doctor shows. First,
a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd warmed up.
A short morality play followed in which a noble head

(09:26):
of house or ringletted female died pathetically for lack of
a miracle tonic identified by name. Finally, the physician himself,
Brinkley shot on stage in a dinner plate hat, cutaway coat,
and pious pants that buttoned up the sides, being and thowing,
singing and selling, waving a bottle of Iris cathartic pills
or maybe Burdock blood bitters or Aunt Fannie's worm candy.
One thing was for sure, whatever it was, cured, whatever

(09:48):
you had. Okay, wait, so you've got a warm up comic,
you've got a feature, and you've got a headliner. Headliner
is pretending to be a Quaker doctor who sells you,
uh nonsense medicine and no matter what you have, and
no matter what's being hacked at the people, it works

(10:08):
and it's a cure. All. I mean that's some Okay.
I like that. I like that they pretty much, you know,
just uh. I mean they're like, this is a stand
up show and it's gonna be hacked. It's ship, but
it's gonna people are gonna love it. Sounds and it's
one of those things were like back in back in

(10:29):
those days, there wasn't TV, there wasn't even radio. There
was fucking nothing to do for most people. So like
some fake doctor comes to town and puts on a show,
maybe you buy his pills just because it's a distraction.
I mean, he's he's selling merch. He's like, here's my show.
Here's the merch that you saw in the show. I
mean brilliant, good, good business plan. I love it. Yes,

(10:49):
slid branding now, um, this was obviously what we would
call snake oil, uh selling like Brinkley was a snake
oil salesman. Have you ever wondered where the term snake
oil comes from? Caitlin Well I haven't wondered that, only
because I'm not. I don't know if I've ever heard
that before. If I have, Like, yeah, I don't know. Again,
I don't know what romulus is, and I don't know

(11:10):
what snake oil is. I'm an idiot. Well, snake oil
salesman is a common term for like somebody who sells bogus,
like people call Alex Jones a snake oil salesman because
he sells his brain bills that are full full of
leaden stuff. And the term came was coined in the
Chicago World's Fair, which was would have been when Brinkley
was about eight years old. Um, And it came when

(11:31):
a man wearing a cowboy costume got on stage and
started strangling dozens of rattlesnakes to death and collecting the
liquid that oozed out of them and selling it as
a medicine. Um. Yeah, yeah, So that's that's literally where
the term snake oil salesman comes from. I mean it's
it's a very literal, Yeah, just a man's strangling snakes

(11:51):
and getting the oil from the snakes. And you know,
in in in terms of our previous conversation about like
the show this entertainment. I would absolutely watch a man
dressed as a fucking cowboy strangling snakes on stage, whether
or not. Yeah, that's a show. Hell yeah, yes, I

(12:12):
kind of want to see Patton Oswald do that, right.
Why Why isn't Kevin Hart my favorite comedian j K
H strangling snakes on stage? Well, and the great thing
about most stand up comedians is that I wouldn't really
care if they are the snakes one like, either way,

(12:33):
I'm going to get a good show, exactly, exactly. Yeah,
well most right, most comedians probably should get bitten a
little bit by a snake, including me. I need to,
you know, to get in check. I need to be
bitten by a snake now. Now, Caitlin, how many rattlesnakes
do you think you could throttle if you, if you,

(12:54):
if your career was on the line. Sophie is helping
me out and saying four. Yeah, that's a pretty good
number of snakes. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, that's solid.
I think Sophie has a lot of confidence in you
than you or at least in your wrists, because, if I,
as I understand it, throttling h rattle snakes is is

(13:14):
really wrist work more than anything. I have a very
firm grip, I think. Yeah, so I've noticed that that's
a big thing about me. So uh. For months, Sally
and John Brinkley toured around pretending to be a Quaker
doctor and his wife selling nonsense medicine from a wagon.
This worked for a while, but it eventually turned out

(13:34):
that he and Sally didn't really like one another. They
split up, not even bothering the divorce, and he headed
off to pursue his medical ambitions in a more serious fashion.
He enrolled at the Bennett Medical College of Chicago and
then the eclectic Medical University of Kansas City. Oh so
he did decide to go to medical school. Well, so
he went to He went to things that were that

(13:55):
had names that made them sound like medical So these
aren't accredited universities. These are in no way accredited. Yeah yeah,
And he didn't get full degrees from these non accredited
universities anyway. He got a twenty five dollar loan from
a loan shark that he never managed to repay, and
eventually he skipped town before finishing school. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, um.

(14:21):
He did get like a sort of undergraduate certification. I
guess you'd call it, but again it was unaccredited. Um Now,
in a little bit of fairness to John Brinkley, at
this point in time in history, medicine wasn't really a
thing in the way it is today. Um So, eclectic
medicine is what we'd call like natural apathy. Now it's
using like herbs and poultices and like waving sticks around

(14:45):
and chanting and stuff like it. It incurred all of
that stuff. But this was nineteen o eight, so like
the real doctors were pouring mercury in people and bleeding
them to death. Um So, there were actually situations in
which a doctor with Brinkley's training would probably do better
work on you than a real doctor because eclectic doctors

(15:05):
didn't bleed people or feed the mercury. So it's there,
he's going to be beyond the point of being fair
to at a certain point. But but up to this state,
like he's not necessarily a hack and a fraud. Medicine
is kind of nonsense. So him being a bad doctor
actually makes him a better doctor then the real doctors

(15:27):
like him being fake. Is that Yeah, it's it's kind
of that like if you're most of medicine was wrong
at this point. Um and and if you're wrong in
a way to which you're not filling people's bodies with
mercury and radium, then you're better for them. And like
there is some there are some like herbs and stuff

(15:48):
that have actual medicinal potential. So like eclectic doctors, yes,
smoking that it is still legal at this point. Um
so yeah, um so about four percent of doctors in
this period where eclectics. Um. Of course Brinkley was not
one of them because he didn't graduate, but he did

(16:08):
get an undergraduate degree that qualified him to practice medicine
and a couple of states. Um. And you know, while
he was sort of bumming around St. Louis, drinking heavily,
he met a one armed man named James Crawford, and
the two decided to open what was essentially a fake
medical practice together. Uh. Crawford decided to go by the
name Dr Burke and Brinkley went by the name Dr Blakeley.

(16:28):
They called their operation the Greenville Electro Medical Doctors. Now,
I just was trying to be fair to eclectic medicine
by talking about how it could be more reasonable than
real medicine at that point in time in history. This
is the point at which we get past them being reasonable,
because nineteen o eight is a period in which electricity
is still new and exciting, and like every new technology,

(16:50):
people assumed that because it was shiny and different, it
must confer incredible health benefits. So electric medicine was kind
of a fat at this point. People would like fake doctors,
would sell electric ointments, electric toothbrushes, electric tinctures, electric food,
electric corsets. Just by shocking someone with electricity, you could
claim to be curing them, and most people would be

(17:11):
surprised enough by the sensation that they just sort of
go along with it. According to the book Charlatan Quote,
Dr Burke asked a few questions, made a few notes,
and put out his palm for twenty five dollars, a
massive sum. From there, the client passing into the treatment
room where Dr Blakeley spent the morning injecting colored water
into rear ends if anyone asked, he said it was
electric medicine from Germany, and ends, Yeah, he's he's shooting

(17:35):
dyed water into people's asses and telling them that it's
electric German medicine. Okay, good, is there? Actually so is
he also so shooting electricity into people's asses or no,
he's just lying and claiming it's electric water medicine. I
think they probably have some like electric gizmos near the

(17:56):
water so that people believe that it's electric medicine. It's
it's just ass water. It's just colored ass water. Good, Okay, Okay, yeah,
so um this this scam worked out for a while,
but obviously shooting people's asses full of colored water did
not care any known problem aside from the dubious problem
of not having enough colored water in your asshole. Brinkley

(18:16):
and Crawford were eventually rightfully arrested for being frauds, and
thus ended the saga of the Greenville electro medical doctors.
I feel like, um, what do people get? What is
that called calonic to like clean out your bod? Yeah?
I wonder if maybe that like dyed water in there
in people's asses was doing something like that. I don't

(18:40):
know if calonics have any sort of medical benefits, but
I just want to give him credit where credits due,
you know. Yeah, I mean, I think colonic would be
a good example of like modern day snake oil, because
while they're all, there are like certain situations in which,
like they can be helpful. They're kind of treated as
cure alls for problems. Um, I guess. I think it's

(19:00):
the same thing as like electrocuting someone and it being
a weird sensation and so you assume something medical has happened.
I think a lot of people get stuff shot up
their asses and are like, well, that feels weird. It
must be doing something. Yes, yeah, the sebo effect kind
of does their rest. Yeah the Yeah. I was going
to make a pun like the ass sebo of fact,

(19:20):
but I don't know if it was gonna work. But
I think that's one of those those jokes that would
that works better written than spoken. Yes, yeah, that's that's
a good one. Well, we tried, we tried, We tried,
we tried. Now, after getting out of jail not a doctor,
Brinkley met a girl named Mini. She would prove to
be the love of his life, mainly because she was

(19:41):
exactly as down with his dreams of pretending to be
a doctor as he was. For three years, the couple
wandered around Kansas and Arkansas, with Brinkley working as a
traveling doctor and many acting as his assistant. He eventually
made enough money at this to buy a diploma, which
made his claims to actually be a doctor more credible.
On May seven, nineteen fifteen, the Eclectic Medical University of

(20:01):
Kansas City gave him the validation he'd always craved. This
MD cost Brinkley a hundred dollars and gave him the
right to practice medicine in eight states. So he immediately
set up shop in Arkansas, working as a rural doctor.
His big strategy was to rent a horse in charge
out of town numerous times as if he was constantly
on important emergency calls saving lives. This particular griff did

(20:22):
not work out and he and many had to leave.
So were the low point in our hero's journey right now.
But you know what can be the high point in
in your heroes journey, listener, Uh and you as well, Caitlin,
is the fine products and or services that UH advertise

(20:42):
on our show, which certainly, yeah, there aren't going to
be snake oil. No, we do not advertise for any
companies that will shoot electric water up your ass, and
if we did, I promise you, Listener, it will be
the best electric ass water that anybody serves. You know,
we we vet all ass based businesses personally, I do
I personally do that. Yes, it's critical, it's important. You

(21:05):
can't advertise for as based medicine without without putting your
own ass on the line exactly. Yeah, I wouldn't be
able to live with myself. So products, we're back. Oh,
those are some good products. Those are really good. Wait.
Can I just quickly recap what we've learned so far

(21:27):
about his life? Please do? Please? Do? So he practices
medicine sort of without any sort of credentials, and then
he goes to uh an unaccredited university and doesn't finish,
and then opens up a medical practice and then gets arrested,
and then he buys a diploma without you know, getting

(21:51):
any sort of medical training or like any additional medical training.
But because he has the diploma that he bought, he
is now certified practice medicine in eight stags. Now, is
this the eclectic mediciner's is like the more legitimate medicine.
It's eclectic medicine, none of it's I mean, yeah, it's

(22:13):
eclectic medicine, which is seen as semi legitimate at that
point in time. I see, Okay, great, well, I mean
I'm proud of him and his accomplishments so far. He's
achieved his dreams. Yeah, I'm sure nothing horrible will happen.
Definitely not so. In nineteen sixteen, Dr Brinkley got a
job at a meat packing plant in Kansas City, working

(22:33):
as a doctor for the animals they kept on hand.
He spent many hours on duty board and watching the
most entertaining thing available to him in those pre television days,
billy goats fucking. He later recalled being impressed by their
considerable lubricity, which I think means the billy goat vaginas
get really looped up, but I'm not really sure. I mean, yeah,

(22:54):
the main syllable there's is lube. So that's that's why it's,
my guest, the root word. Yeah. So, okay, he thought
billy goats fucked good, and he was also impressed by
the fact that they got sick less than any other
species of animal at the plant. So he started to
think about what would it be possible to take some

(23:15):
of the some of the traits of a billy goat
and put that into a person. Okay, it's important to
understand the importance of what we're called glands to cutting
edge medicine of the day. Now. Glands were generally testicles
from various species, including human beings. I'd like to read

(23:37):
a quote from the website quack Watch that sort of
sums up the building science in this period of gland replacement.
Charles Edward Brown Cicard, a noted French physiologist, had shocked
the medical community by injecting himself with the crushed testicles
of young dogs and guinea pigs. Afterwards, he claimed that
he had regained the physical stamina and intellectual vigor of

(23:57):
his youth. Many men availed themselves of Cicard's methods, but
once the placebo effect was filtered out, little remained. In Vienna,
physiologist Eugene Steinek proposed that youthful vitality could be restored
by increasing levels of testosterone. The easiest way to do this,
stine said, was through vasectomy. Sperm production wasted testosterone, and
if the channel leading from the tests to the ejaculatory

(24:19):
duct were tied off, then blood levels of testosterone would rise.
Brinkley may also have heard of the work of Serge Voroff,
a French doctor who was stirring up a storm of
controversy with his experimental gland transplants. Voranoff had been a
physician in the court of the King of Egypt, and
there had spent a great deal of time treating the
court eunuchs who suffered from a variety of illnesses. He
hypothesized that maintaining active genital glance was the secret to health.

(24:41):
As proof, he cited his experiments with an aging ram
into which he had transplanted the testicles of a young lamb.
The rams will got thicker and his sexual vigor returned.
Varanoff then went on to transplant bits of monkey tests
into aging men. He claimed success, although he could offer
no scientific validation of his claim. So, okay, so science
of this time wast a lotta yeah, just like just

(25:05):
men being obsessed with their balls, and that has not
changed to the science of today. You're absolutely right, yes,
But in that point in time they would look at
other animals that had big balls or fucked a lot
and be like, what if I put those balls in
my balls? And yeah, I mean it's some innovative thinking.

(25:26):
So yeah, it's it's innovative. Um. So all this was
cooking off in the air in the medical community while
Brinkley was getting his start. Now in midst nineteen seventeen,
he was briefly drafted by the military to work as
a doctor for the sixty four Infantry Division. He served
a total about two months, most of which he spent
in sick bay, complaining of multiple rectal fistulas. He was

(25:46):
kicked out of the military in August. Next Dr Brinkley
and many moved to a little Kansas town called Milford.
It was not quite in the middle of nowhere, but
you might call it nowhere adjacent. Brinkley worked as a
rural doctor again, and his wife worked as a midwife.
Then had enough money to get by working incredibly hard
and providing a useful service to their local community. Naturally,
John Brinkley hated it and desperately wanted a way out

(26:08):
that way. She's not enough balls, not enough balls. Well,
the good news is that he was about to get
so many more balls than anybody should ever have. He
was approached one day by a forty six year old
farmer named Bill Stittsworth. Now, Stittsworth came by Brinkley's office
one day and said, there's something wrong with me, though

(26:29):
look at me, you wouldn't judge it. I do look husky,
don't I. When Brinkley nodded, Stittsworth continued, I'm all in
no pep, I'm a flat tire. Now, this was Stittsworth's
way of slowly admitting, in you know, nineteen like teens terms,
that his dick didn't work so well anymore. Uh, this
shouldn't have been surprising. I think it's pretty normal for
forty six year old men who work an intense, backbreaking

(26:50):
physical labor job to have have trouble with that. In fact,
it might be weirder if he'd had no issues at all.
But Stittsworth complained to Dr Brinkley that he'd tried serums, medicines,
and a tricity, all to no avail. Now, next, according
to legends that were later spread by Dr Brinkley himself,
the old farmer sighed and said, too bad, I don't
have Billy goat nuts. Yeah good. We only have Dr

(27:16):
Brinkley's recollections of what happened next, and they come from
a biography he commissioned twenty years later called Life of
a Man. So, you know, put a little bit of
a little bit of salt on this next quote. The
doctor half closed his eyes and considered, and then he
shook his head slowly. The code of ethics his father
had drilled into him forever forbade him from any conducts,

(27:36):
especially with relation to healing, except the utterly honest and straightforward.
But the father begged and begged, and eventually Brinkley agreed
he would try and put goat testicles into the farmer's body.
His official publications made it later seem like he was
basically forced into it out of sheer empathy for the
distraught patient, But years later Stittsworth's family would admit that
Brinkley had offered the old farmer hundreds and hundreds of

(27:57):
dollars to let him experiment on his body. That's cool.
Where's this farmer getting all this money for for goatballs?
The farmer got the money from Dr Brinkley. Oh okay,
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he bribed He bribed him to
let him put goatballs in him to test out the surgery.
I see, okay, yeah yeah, yeah. So Dr Brinkley removed

(28:20):
a healthy goats testicles and just sort of shoved him
inside the farmer's nutsack and then sewed it up. Yeah okay.
Stittsworth reported an increase in vitality, possibly due to the
placebo effect and also possibly due to just lying. The
words spread across town, and soon another farmer and then

(28:40):
another had received goatball implants. Shortly thereafter, miss Stittsworth demanded
that she get a set of goat ovaries to increase
her own fertility and vitality. Next to Life of a
Man quote dimly, Brinkley had begun to realize that he
was gifted beyond the run of doctors. So he realized

(29:01):
that he was an unusually talented surgeon and an unusually
brilliant thinker due to the incredible success of his his
goat testicle and ovary implants. Now, I don't know if
you know this or not, but is he replacing the
human testicles with the good stuff or he's just adding
them in addition to what's already there. He's just jamming

(29:21):
them up in there, Okay, just shoving. Now sometimes it's
just bits of goat testicles. He does it a little
bit different every time because he's not a real doctor. Sure,
I mean, who needs consistency when it comes consistent medical
medical procedures? So uh, he decided that someone with his

(29:46):
sheer god given talent could not limit themselves to the
rules of the jealous sheep ethics of the American Medical
Association and the other gradually professionalizing medical bodies of the era.
Dr Brinkley had developed an intense dislike of the a
m A. Some of this may be due to the
fact that a few weeks after his first goatball implantation,
he traveled to Chicago to take a refresher course on surgery.

(30:07):
He failed the class. His teacher said that this was
because of his attendance not being regular and because of
his indulgence in alcohol. I admonished him to leave liquor
alone and to concentrate on worthwhile endeavor and improve himself
as a man and a physician, to which he replied,
I have a scheme up my sleeve, and the whole
world will hear of it. Okay, So he's just like
this drunk dude. He's just a drunk guy, loudly admitting

(30:32):
that he's planning to scam everybody, and pretty successfully scamming everybody. Yeah, alright.
In August nineteen eighteen, John Brinkley opened to the Brinkley
Institute of Health in Milford, Kansas. The growth of his
clinic was massively aided by the fact that months after
his surgery, Stittsworth and his wife had a boy. They

(30:52):
named him Billy. Oh no, after Billy, he came the
first goat gland baby, and of course his very existence
was credited to Dr Brinkley's incredible science. More testimonials followed
soon after the old farmer and business then poured into
Dr Brinkley's clinic. He began charging seven and fifty dollars

(31:14):
in operation. That's about fourteen thou dollars in modern money. Obviously, yeah,
it's expensive. It's like what you'd pay for major cosmetic
surgery today. But it's just goat testicals. Um. Now, obviously,
many of these implantations did not work. Some of them,
I mean none of them worked, but many of them
had disastrous side effects. But it is kind of how

(31:36):
many people had goat testical pieces put into their balls
without anything terrible happening. The human body is incredible, is
what I'm getting at. It's very resilient, yes, yeah, yeah.
Part of why so many people reported incredible benefits undoubtedly
owes to the placebo effect. Some of it, though, was
due to Dr Brinkley's peculiar advertising brilliance. Here's quackwatch again.

(31:59):
All men did the Brinkley operation, he declared, but the
procedure was most suited to the intelligent and least suited
to the stupid type. This, of course, ensured that few
of his patients would admit they had not benefited from
the operation, So he warned people before going in that like,
it doesn't work on dumb people. Wow. So he's kind
of brilliant. So he's putting people in a position where

(32:22):
they have to basically just lie and say, yeah, this
is working out great for me. Huh, Okay, love love,
a lot of love. Heavy gas lighting in medical procedures
as well. I mean, he is the gas lighting ist doctor.
I think I can imagine, all right, I mean, so

(32:43):
another question. He's mostly doing this for um tests. He's
putting testicles into men's ball sex. But there was at
least one case of a woman having over over Okay,
so there are okay, all right, So he's just that
he did more balls than overies. I see. But he's uh,

(33:06):
maybe not equal, but like you know, there's definitely yeah,
he he overaries up a lot of ladies and actually,
you know, spoilers, Caitlin, he's kind of a feminist icon.
But we'll get to that. In a little bit yeah
feminist icon goatball Dr John Brinkley great now right as
the greatest grift of right is the greatest grift of

(33:29):
Dr Brinkley's life was kicking off the great influenza epidemic hit.
This is the nightmare, maish, rave wave of disease that
killed more people than World War One. It was a
terrible nightmare and completely countered to the rest of his life.
Dr Brinkley rose wonderfully to the situation. He was remembered
by locals as being a wonderful doctor during this period
who only lost a single patient to the flu epidemic
and worked all around, you know, offering people, uh free

(33:52):
care and what not to take care of the horribly
ill people who were dying of the influenza. So this
is like a singular moment in his career, Like for
this this one period of time he was a real
doctor and and then he just went right back to
scamming people for the rest of his life. But there
is one redeeming moment in his life, and it's the
influence of epidemic. So all right, there you go. Yeah, Now,

(34:15):
once the epidemic was over, Dr Brinkley got right back
to work scamming the ship out of people. As his
work drew attention and media coverage, people were soon literally
camping out around his clinic, men and women for a
little while. Implanting goat ovaries and ladies was almost as
booming a trade as implanting goat testicles and men. Brinkley
claimed the ovaries would enhance fertility, but would also remove
wrinkles and increase breast size. So, I mean everything that

(34:39):
a woman cares about, everything that a woman cares about
in one set of severed goat overies. I'm gonna go
get my goat overies right after we're done. I mean,
you know, I don't want to. I don't want to
spoil the next ad break, but we are selling goat
ovary pills for a limited time. Yeah, guaranteed to do
whatever whatever you need it. Overis will take care of it. Yeah.

(35:03):
So uh Now, obviously a lot of Brinkley's patients got
sick and died because he was just filling people up
with the dead body parts of animals, and that's not
great for you. But the Internet didn't exist, and so
Dr Brinkley was able to sort of fill the media
of the day with tales of his patients quote astonishing
sexual vigor, and most people just sort of trusted him.
He also shared case studies of patients whose lives were

(35:26):
changed in more significant ways. One popular account was of
a boy Brinkley described as deranged, who, in his words quote,
had been told finally that he was incurable and must
remain a mental defected defective. He had decided to commit
suicide if I failed to remedy his condition, And thirty
six hours after the insertion of goat glands, this patient's
temperature had risen to above a hundred and three fahrenheit,

(35:46):
but became normal twenty four hours later and has since remained.
So his mind is gradually cleared. He looks and feels younger,
and his contemplating marriage, the hideous dreams and nightmares which
had destroyed his sleep and rest all his past life
have left him. My in case of insanity, caused this
time by excessive masturbation, was a young bank clerk brought
to me from a state institution following gland transplantation. His

(36:07):
mind cleared complete completely, and he is now the head
of a large banking institution. I mean, those are some
ringing endorsements. Now, it's interesting to me that goat testicles
can both increase your vitality and help you get erections
to impregnate your wife and stop your excessive masturbation so
that you can become a bank president, and also apparently

(36:30):
um cure mental illness and depression. Yeah, I mean, why
wouldn't goat balls clear depression? Exactly? Yeah, that's just obvious.
So within a couple of years, John Brinkley had identified
twenty seven different illnesses that could be cured by goatballs,
everything from dementia to farting. He ensured people that his
operations had success rate, which was just low enough to

(36:53):
explain away the odd death or life altering infection as
a result of his not entirely competent surgical administrations. As
a rule, Brinkley was way worse at surgery than he
was at selling his slogans, all energy is sex energy,
and a man is as old as his glands. We're
both pretty great. I mean, what year was this? I
mean this is nineteen eighteen? Wow, Like all energy is

(37:16):
sex energy is like something you'd hear at a fucking
very specific kind of yoga retreat in Santa Monica. Right,
I feel like I tweeted that like two days ago.
Incredible because he was ahead of his time and will
consistently be ahead of his time until the day he dies. Right,
But I don't want to I don't want to spoil

(37:37):
things too much, so uh. In private, Dr Brinkley had
a habit of calling his patients old fools, especially while drinking,
But in public he was the picture of the genteel
man of medicine. Much of his credibility came from the
Van Dyke goatee he wore, which was seen as the
hallmark of the doctor, because people back then were very dumb,
just as they all are now. The reality, of course,
is that John Brinkley was no more a doctor than

(37:58):
I am a mechanic, just because was able to hit
my car that one time and make the engine turnover.
According to the book Charlatan, he only had a wavering
conception of how to perform his own signature surgery quote.
Sometimes he slivered the animal gland like a clove of
garlic and put the pieces in the patient. Sometimes he
joined the smaller testicle to the larger, a process he
likened to embedding a marble in an apple. Sometimes the

(38:19):
operation was that's that's pretty fucked up. Oh so cril stop. Okay.
Sometimes the operation was no more complex than tossing a
Christmas present into a bag. Skill wasn't the issue technically speaking.
He was a competent surgeon when he put his mind
to it, but quality control was if he at best.

(38:39):
Brinkley performed operations both before and after the cocktail hour,
and as his enterprise expanded, he passed off more and
more of the work to assistance with medical credentials even
whispier than his own. As a result, dozens of patients
died over the years, either in the operating room or
shortly after the return home. Many others were permanently maimed.
So that's very cool. Wait can I backtrack for just

(39:01):
one second? And so his credibility, the reason why people
trusted him was largely did you say, because of his goatee,
like his facial part of it? Okay? So yeah, he
had he had the kind of facial hair all doctors
were supposed to have. Okay, I didn't realize that was
a thing. Number one. Number two? Were they called goatees

(39:21):
back then? And did that have anything to do with
the fact that people trusted his goat because if it
was like he has a goatee and then he puts
goat balls into your body, I see what you're getting in.
But they called it a Van dyke Um. Sophia will
show you the picture of him and you can see, like,
once you see his facial hair, you'll recognize it as
like every doctor in like a nineteen forties like Looney

(39:44):
Tunes cartoon has the same hair. Yeah you see that. Yeah, okay, okay, Yeah,
it's wild that you could just have a certain type
of facial hair and be like, yes, this is my profession. Well,
I guess he's a doctor. Look at his facial hands.
There there was the world like we get down on

(40:08):
the Internet because all the Nazis and the anti vaccine
lies and stuff. But before the Internet, being a doctor
just been having a goatee and a lab coat. So
it's it's not like people have ever been very good
at vetting reality. Yes, I suppose some progress has been
made since then. Yeah, it's just been a consistently mixed

(40:29):
bag now. Uh. Dr Brinkley build the purpose of his
work is aiding hopeless couples and conceiving children. He sold
he slid articles into the local news with titles like
Dr Jo Brinkley swamped with let us from women craving
halo of motherhood, And the reality is that a lot
of desperate people did see him as something of a
fertility messiah. At one point, he claimed to be able

(40:51):
to even reverse hysterectomies by shoving goat ovaries inside ladies.
By the summer of nineteen twenty, he'd pretty much but
by the summer of nineteen twenty, he'd pretty much stopped
performing surgery and female clients. It's debatable as to why
my suspicion would be that stuff like male vitality is
easy to boost via the placebo elect a loan effect
a loan since erections are largely mental. So if you

(41:14):
tell some guy he's got supercharged goatballs in his body,
maybe he actually gets more erections. But you can't really
trick women into having a uterus, like the placebo effect
doesn't go that. Robert, think again, because I think you
could trick me into thinking I had a uterus if
I didn't, which I don't want my uterus. So actually
that brings me to me trying to sell my uterus

(41:37):
right mere on this and then you can put it.
What Okay, hang on, what if there's a sick goat
and you took out my uterus and gave it to
the goat. I feel like, based on everything we've learned
so far, that would actually help the sick goat. You know,
you're thinking like a nineteen twenties doctor, because right around

(41:58):
this time, I think it was a French physician to
a monkey's ovaries and put it in a woman just
to see if he could make a monkey human hybrid.
They were just trying anything. These would throw everything at
the wall days of medicine, like there were no rules,
there was no like like people tried to do everything

(42:18):
because they like they just figured out like antibiotics, which
is like, you know, you come from the era when
like getting like scraped by a wooden sliver on your
way out to the barn is a death sentence, and
antibiotics seemed like fucking magic. Um So, people are just
like anything's possible, they try it everything. Um So, it's

(42:40):
like all of this is really ridiculous, and the credible
doctors of the day are all against Brinkley and say
he's crazy, which we will talk about a lot more later.
But people aren't quite as dumb as they would have
been in another era to believe this stuff worked just
because a lot of medicine was fucking nonsense back then. Right, yeah, right,
So we will continue you talking about Dr John Brinkley

(43:01):
and his nonsense medicine. But you know what's not nonsense, Caitlin,
The products that were about to tell you about, Well
you got it half right, But you forget the services
and the services. Yes, you never want to forget the services.
A service without a product is like a product without
a service, exactly products. We're back. Sovie just called me

(43:29):
a nerd, which I don't appreciate. Sovie. Soylvie, would you
would you kindly, since I'm not there right now, throw
the throw the throwing bagels across the room and anger
for me. I have to hold on. So he's gonna
get throwing bagels. Well she does that, I'm gonna keep
reading about Dr Brinkley. So uh. Brinkley had attained enough

(43:50):
for down that he was able to visit Park Avenue
Hospital in Chicago and perform thirty four gonad transplants. He
had moved on from just operating on local farmers. One
of his patients was a judge. Another was the chancellor
of the university's law school, a guy named J. J. Tobias.
When the Syracuse Harold interviewed to Bias after and asked
if he felt younger, he said, I feel twenty five

(44:10):
years younger. I'm a new man, full of pep, strong, healthy,
ready to go on with my work. I was ill,
old and played out, but the operation has revivified me.
Next the reporter asked, how does it feel to have
been old and then be young again? Glorious? It is
so wonderful. It is almost unbelievable. The public cannot appreciate
what the operation means. There has been some levity over
the news of Gland operations, but they should be treated

(44:33):
with the greatest respect and admiration. So this is this
is how he moves on from like, I'm gonna give
you erections with goatballs, so I will literally make you
younger with goat testicles, and like, because people want to
be younger so badly, A whole lot of distinguished men
just buy right into it. Right. First of all, can
I say that I love your old timey voice. Thank you.

(44:56):
I'm very proud of it. You're doing a great job.
Say it's wild. I mean, I guess this isn't specific
to men, but I guess because we're talking about I mean,
men are mostly his patients. But the lengths that men
will go to to just try to fuck better and
have better balls and stuff, it's it's amazing, Yeah it is.

(45:22):
I feel like if instead of fire, the first human
invention had been viagra, like men at least would never
have invented anything else, like it would have all it
would have all been on women, concrete and stuff like
men would just but no, we've got we've got the
dick pill. What else do we need? Which, honestly I
wish that had happened, because I think the world would
be a much better place if women had invented every

(45:45):
thousand man. We got to go back. Let's get a
time machine, go back to you know, uh, Neanderthal days,
you know, caveman times, and just give give the men
viagra and then be like, all right, ladies, the your

(46:08):
your path is is free and clear to do whatever
you want. Men. These pills will make you dicks. Do
whatever you want, ladies, take it away. Here's it's all
on you now. Yeah, one can help. So for a
long time, John Brinkley was able to basically portray himself
as the man who had conquered aging. He began to

(46:30):
make bold claims about his ability to cure other diseases
like blindness and the very near future. His delusions of
grandeur were compelling to people who saw him at symposiums
and at his office, They were less compelling to the
people who worked with him on a daily basis. For
one thing, John still drank way too much. One night,
he got wasted and destroyed his neighbor's car with an
axe for unclear but certainly awesome reasons. Another time, he

(46:52):
got plowed and chased a bunch of his own patients
out of his hospital with a butcher knife. In March
of n one of his neighbors filed a protection order. Again,
it's the good doctor, Brinkley explained. I made some remarks
concerning this fellow that caused him to be afraid, I guess,
and they put me under a bond. I don't know
whether I was arrested or not, but I had to
give a bond of a thousand dollars not to shoot him.

(47:13):
I don't know whether I was arrested or not, and
I think I don't think he's lying about that. I
think he was so drunking, like, yeah, I don't know
what the funk happened. I chased people with weapons all
the time. This is the stuff that makes me almost
like him, because it makes me feel like he's a
kindred spirit. Because I don't know if you know this

(47:34):
about me, Caitlin, but I love chasing my patients and
neighbors with knives. It's just a good time. Everybody has fun.
You get your cardio in. Yeah, yeah, good, good, good,
Everything's great. Anyway, there was a rumor that Dr Brinkley's assistant,
Dr Osborne, who was one eared, was one eared because
Dr Brinkley had literally bitten the other ear off. Entirely

(47:57):
possible that this is the case, like a lot of
people lost ears for random reasons back then. But yeah,
he seems like he might have been an earbier. He
would not be the craziest thing he did. But no
amount of bad behavior from Dr Brinkley was enough to
turn the town of Milford against him. Uh the huge
amount of money he brought and helped and by the
early twenties he was performing fifty operations a month, which

(48:18):
meant his clinic was bringing in five thousand dollars a
year in nineteen twenties money that's roughly seven million dollars
a year today, So he's he's doing well for himself,
and a decent chunk of that money got reinvested back
into Milford. He paid for new sidewalks, a new sewer,
electric lights, a paved road to the railroad station, and
a new bank. He tried to start a zoo and

(48:40):
even bought the town a bear. Unfortunately the bear was
too loud and it kept Dr Brinkley awake at night,
so he shot it to death. He bought the town
a beard, just a bear to it was too loud
a bunch. Oh my gosh, I'm just thinking of Paddington

(49:03):
Paddington Bear. And anyway, that's not important. Okay, here's my
real question. Where is he getting all of the goat balls? Goats?
And in fact, patients could pick out they had a
pin of goats, and patients would pick out the goat
they wanted their balls from. Okay, So it was like

(49:24):
going to a nice like one of those fancy steak
restaurants where you get to like pick the animal get
to you get to pick your goat or like a
lobster and a lobster. Okay, so I understand that. Yeah,
so I understand that goat balls come from goats. I'm
not I don't know who Romulus is, but I do
know that much. But so he's like, he is he

(49:45):
breeding the goats and how could he even breed them
if he's taking other balls away? And then also like
that has to meet that's so many goat Yeah, I
mean he's he's he's buying a lot of goats. Okay,
he's buying fifty goats a month or so, which is
a sizeable number of goats, and then just like castrating them.
And then yeah, yeah, did the goats do they live

(50:07):
after that? Okay, he's eating the goat. The goat could
stay alive without balls, but I assume they were eaten
after that. I don't really know, though, you know, well,
as I've been written about his goats, I want to
know more about his goats. So he's I feel like,
because he's such a shitty surgeon and he is drunk

(50:27):
all the time, he's probably just accidentally killing these goats
when he's like castrating them or whatever. I'm going to
guess he wasn't very careful with the goat. Definitely not.
I feel so bad for all this, these poor goats.
The goats are victim and the bear is a victim
all of the people who got goat balls shoved into them.

(50:48):
I would say that, Yeah, I feel less bad for
them than the bear, because the bear didn't do fucking anything,
neither to the goats. I just don't like goats as
much as I like bears. And that's I guess racism
on my part. I mean, there's no Paddington goat, so
I get it. There's no Paddington goat and there's no
goat on the California State Flague. The goats are baby

(51:11):
goats are so cute the way they jump around, and yeah, yeah,
very cute, very cute animals. I know what you're wondering
at this point, Caitlin, What kind of goat? What kind
of goat did he get the testicles? I do wonder
that because I don't really know the different types of goats. Well.
He preferred to use Toggenburg goat balls because he thought

(51:36):
they were better balls. One time, he did have a
set of patients from California who demanded that he put
angora goat testicles in them. I mean, I guess because
angora goats are used to make very fancy spiders. Yeah yeah,
and so they wanted they wanted the fanciest goats because
they were Californians. Obviously, cent anga goat testicles stink horribly
and made the testicles of his customers stink horribly. Um

(51:59):
so this this was one of the issues that he
encountered in his goatball practice, because I'm sure they're their
their balls smelled fine otherwise without the angora, Like people
aren't bathing every day back then, certain their nineteen twenties
balls smelled wonderful before the goats. Yeah, okay, So wait,

(52:21):
what is the first type of goat you said? Uh?
Toggenberg goat? Toggenberg. I've never heard the type of goat. Well, now, Caitlin,
if you ever at a party and someone's like, hey,
if I want to replace my testicles with goat testicles,
what type of goat should I use, you'll know it's
a Toggenberg's. There's no other goat to replace your testicles with.

(52:41):
And rest assured that every party I go to that
question is being asked. So oh, I know, I know,
we go to a lot of the same parties and
I'm I'm usually shouting about goat testicles at any given
one of them can confirm mhm. Now, the the issues
of patients occasionally demanding smelly goat testicles was minor compared
to the major issue presented by real doctor Morris fish Bean. Now,

(53:05):
fish Bean was the editor of the Journal of americ
the American Medical Association or JAMMA, and fish Bean was
like an actual doctor. Uh and the the A m A.
At this point, you know, they still did some stuff
that we would consider quackery. That they were trying to
apply real science to medicine, so they were gradually learning
what didn't work, as opposed to just continuing to jam
goat testicles and people uh for huge amounts of money. Anyway,

(53:28):
according to Quackwatch, phish Bean quote called Brinkley a smooth
tongue charlatan and urged the authorities to provoke his right
to practice. Brinkley's assertion that his procedure could cure conditions
raging from insanity to acne to influenza and high blood
pressure amounted to quackery. Fish Being said in response to
this Brinkley called the American Medical Association a meat cutters union,
in charge that its members were jealous of him because

(53:49):
they were losing business. So by nine two, John Brinkley
had gotten rich enough selling quack nonsense remedies to make
vain men feel younger that there was really only one
place on earth for him to go. Now, next, Los Angeles.
Obviously that's where you go. That's where you go. There
he met up with Harry Chandler, the owner of the
Los Angeles Times. Chandler had invited him out to California

(54:12):
in the first place to do a story on him,
because Harry Chandler was the true paragon of journalism. He
intended to do this story by having Dr Brinkley insert
goat testicles into one of his editors. He told John,
if the operation is a success, I'll make you the
most famous surgeon in America. If it's a failure, I'll
damn you with the same gusto. Now, the issue that
confronted Dr Brinkley is that under California law, his medical

(54:35):
license was not valid. Thankfully, this was the nineteen twenties
and Harry Chandler was able to secure him a thirty
day permit to practice medicine, and so doctor John Brinkley
began cutting out goat testicles and sticking them inside human
beings once more. He implanted new balls and Chandler's editor
in a U. S. Circuit Court judge, in several unnamed
movie stars, and according to rumor, even in Harry Chandler himself.

(54:57):
Many of his patients gave his work rave reviews, as
can be seen in the title of this nineteen l
A Times article, New Life and Glands. Doctor Brinkley's patients
he has show improvement many victims of incurable diseases. I
could twelve hundred operations all are successful. Do you think,
like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton have entirely possible goat

(55:20):
balls in their bodies? I think yeah, he even I
think he met Buster Keaton and Buster Keaton made a
movie in this time that referenced goat gland operations. It's
entirely yeah, it's entirely possible. Like we know several movie
stars because it's like their movie stars, if you tell them,
you can make them young again and funck better. Like

(55:40):
that's that's Hollywood's never changed. Like like if he came
to town, today and people believed this, like fucking every
famous guy in town would be Yeah, who else Fatty
are Buckle? Was that a I feel like that was
a guy from that era. I should know this sever
a guy. This is before he crushed that woman to

(56:02):
death accidentally. Well that's probably not what happened, but that's
what he got, That's what he got tired for. It
seems like he kind of got screwed over on that one.
Uh and may have actually been a nice guy. I
don't know if either. We'll do some research about it.
Yeah I did. Did we talk about it in the
episode about the Nazis in Hollywood? Um? Speaking of which

(56:23):
Nazis do come into this story later? Oh? Yes, it's
it's gonna be fun now. After performing worth of operations,
John Brinkley hit upon the idea of expanding his practice.
He decided to open a new clinic and in Sonata, California.
I secured a location at in Sonata because of what
appeared to be climactic conditions peculiarly favorable to goat gland operations.

(56:45):
To perform the operation most successfully, the surgeon should be
located where the climate ranges around seventy degrees and is
not subject to shop changes. So you really want those
cool southern California breezes on your goatballs? Yes you do,
of course you do. That's just basic science. Yeah. Absolutely.
But alas, John Brinkley's ability to practice in the Golden

(57:07):
State relied on his ability to get a permanent medical
license there, and this was something the state of California
was unwilling to grant him do. In large part to
the crusading work of Dr Morris Fish, Beam Brinkley found
himself denied and forced back to Milford. John put a
good face on it, claiming he'd never really wanted to
move out to California anyway, and that everyone knew the
calm restorative powers of the Kansas countryside were better for

(57:29):
a hospital than stupid old California. Yeah. The reality is
that he was deeply worried. Morris Fish, being in the
a m A, were increasingly writing his ass for all
of the you know, the dangerously unregulated surgery that he
was performing. Uh. Brinkley fired back by having his publicity
people shoot out even more testimonials from satisfied goat testical recipientsials, testimonials.

(57:54):
I didn't even get that that's good. I'm here for testimonials. Yeah,
well make that soby can we T shirt that she's nodding,
not reluctantly, she's nodding enthusiastically. M Maybe goatball recipient T
shirts that just say I have a goat's testicles. I mean, we'll,

(58:16):
we'll work on the copy. We'll we'll, we'll keep, we'll keep,
We'll keep being in that back and forth. Brinkley's biggest
coup was Senator Wesley Staley of Colorado, who called Brinkley
and his wife quote two of the finest people and
the greatest benefactors to mankind on earth. I wear goat
glands and I'm proud of it. That's what we put
on the shirt. And then blow that testimonial testimonial. Dr

(58:44):
Brinkley collected a hundred different testimonials and testimonials into a
book called Shadows and Sunshine and published it in an
effort to fight back against what he claimed was the
A m A's dangerous misinformation. The A m A tried
to repost, most notably with a series of posters titled
Testimonials Are Worth Us, which featured testimonials from patients claiming
to have been cured to various diseases from quack medicine

(59:04):
on one side, and then those patients death certificates listening
the cause of death as the exact illness they claimed
to have had cured on the other side. These facts
had close to zero impact on the American people. Folks
still clamored to spend sixty five Yeah, yeah, exactly. People. Still,
we're more than willing to spend seven fifty dollars each
on goat glands. But what about the folks who were

(59:25):
too poor for Dr Brinkley's revolutionary testical surgery. Well, according
to the book Charlatan Quote, Brinkley had this angle covered
already with his special gland emotion, which he sold mail
order for a hundred dollars. Rectal syringe included. Oh, if
you couldn't afford to get goatballs implanted in your body,

(59:46):
you would send you a bunch of ground up goat
testicles and an ass syringe. Okay, let me be clear
about this. Sure, if i've the I feel like you
don't need a syringe too and search something into your rectum.
Your rectum is already like has an opening that you
can put stuff in there. Why but you really want

(01:00:07):
you want to squirt this stuff up there. You really
want to. I mean, I don't I don't know if
you've ever squirted squirted ground up goat testicles inside your asshole,
but you you really want to want to get them
right up in them guts. Okay, right up in them guts.
That's because that's where testicles do their most important work,
is right up in them guts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly, Okay, Yeah,
of course, of course this is just basic science. We all,

(01:00:31):
we all, we all graduated eighth grade. We know how
science works. You shove, you shove the goat balls as
far up your ass as you can go, and then
you're healthy again. Okay. I just I'm like, I want
to puke at the thought of a rectal wringe. Yeah,
but it's one of the worst combination of words that
I can imagine. Okay. Already. Of course people imitated Dr

(01:00:55):
Brinkley's goat gland uh products. There was the Youth and
Chemical Laboratory of Illinois, the Vitalo Gland Company of Denver,
gland all gland tone Glandine. Americans in the nineteen twenties
absolutely could not get enough glands. The money flowed in,
and John Brinkley eventually realized that he needed to do
something with it. He decided to build a radio transmitter.

(01:01:21):
He didn't call that, didit? Nobody? Nobody calls that ship. Yeah,
he decides to build a radio transmitter in He got
his first broadcasting license and started construction of a massive
transmitting tower, one of the very first in the American Midwest. Now,
radio wasn't really something that existed in a big way
back then. It was early enough in the history of

(01:01:42):
the medium that there was actually quite a bit of
debate as to whether or not advertising should even be
allowed on the radio. Most of what was out there
was just broadcast of symphony orchestras. Another really boring bullshit
Brinkley station, KFKB, which stood for Kansas First Kansas Best,
was going to be different. Well. He waited for construction
to be completed. John Brinkley and many left the critical

(01:02:03):
business of implanting goatballs into people to their assistance and
went on an ocean liner voyage to Asia. They stopped
in China, where Dr Brinkley inserted goat testicles into the
president of the Bank of Peaking. Then they steamed hard
to Japan, where Brinkley proceeded to insert more goat glands
into more human males. On April nineteen twenty three, the
Gettysburg Star and Sentinel ran this article gland transplantation now

(01:02:25):
used by Japan to put aged infirm back at work,
high class goat prices sore okay. Quote from that article,
Goat gland transplantation has been made compulsory in Japan by
the government in order to rejuvenate aged charity patients. Within
the past few months, more than two thousand of these
inmates have been undergone the operation and are all again

(01:02:47):
earning their own living. So that's exciting. Yeah, it was.
It was a lie obviously, I mean, yes, it was.
But also if you if you look at it from
the point of view that it's not a lie. He's
actually a really good person. Yeah, if you if you
pretend it's not a lie, he's an incredible doctor. I'm
surprised that he when you're saying earlier that he like

(01:03:09):
sank so much of his money into like helping his
town and I mean buying a bear that he did
later shoot and kill. But I mean he is I
suppose he's he's more um philanthropic than I would have imagined.
But yeah, and we'll get to that in a little bit.
Some of that may have been self preservation, because it

(01:03:32):
pays off for him in a big way in the
second part of this story. Yeah, but I think also
he just kind of wanted to be the biggest man
in town. And if you're going to be the biggest
man in town and you don't want people to hate you,
you got to bribe them with nice things, right right, Okay.
Dr Brinkley, through his interlocuters in the media, began to
claim that the goat glands he was putting in people

(01:03:53):
did more than just restore their vitality. They helped breed
a better class of human being. It was thinking that
was delirious lee in line with the popular eugenics talking
points of the days. One of his minions, Dr W. H.
Blue of New York City told reporters the children of
parents who have been endowed with goat glands a healthy
and alert to an unusual degree. New glands mean not
only new vitality to men and women now living, but

(01:04:14):
they actually mean better babies, I say, in this and
making possible the superior type of human being. Dr Brinkley
has made a discovery of the first importance to mankind. Wait,
is this the part of the story that the Nazis
coming Because I know, shockingly enough, this is not the
part of the story where the Nazis come into it. Now.
Dr Brinkley was in reality about to make a discovery

(01:04:36):
that would change the course of mankind and all of
our lives forever. But that discovery had nothing to do
with goat glands. It is, however, going to come next
in part two of the epic tale of John Brinkley,
the man who loved adding the balls of other animals
to the balls of human beings. What a good cliffhanger.
Thank you, thank you. I was I was proud of
that one too. Caitlin, you wanna plug some plug doubles?

(01:04:58):
Sure don't. Don't. Don't plug goat glands into the audience,
because there's been enough of that done already. Well, I
guess I have to undo some damage I did suit
my patients. Um No. You can follow me on Twitter
and Instagram at Caitlin Durante. That's c A I T

(01:05:20):
L I N. And then you can listen to the
Bechtel Cast, my podcast about the representation of women in movies.
That super producer Sophie sitting right next to me also
produces um. And you know, there hasn't been a biopic
made about John Brinkley, but if there what it was,

(01:05:43):
you can bet your ass we would have covered it
on the Bechtel cast. You what, I think it would
pass the Bechtel test because John Brinkley was a feminist icon. Yes,
and actually little known fact um placing the testicles of
goats in to a human man. The act of that,
surprisingly enough, does pass the Bechdel test. Yeah, that's a

(01:06:07):
that's a little discussed corollary to the Bechtel test that
you can either have two women have a conversation that
that doesn't involve a manner relationship, or you can have
somebody insert goat testicles and do a human scrotum. Right,
And I'm glad that we've cleared that up right now,
right now, it's important. Yes, So yeah, check out my

(01:06:27):
podcast and yeah, follow me on those places. Okay, you
can find me on Twitter at I right, Okay, you
can find me on the Graham as the kids call
it at at Bastard's Pod, and also you can find
this podcast on the gram at Bastard's Pot. You can't
find me there because Sophie runs both of those because
I am not allowed. Um, but that's for for the best,

(01:06:49):
for the best. I'm sure she's nodding, is she not
in Caitlin, Yes, enthusiastically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems right. Um.
You can find t shirts on t public dot com.
I have another podcast called it Could Happen here. Uh
if you feel like, after this lively story of Testical implants,
you want to hear horrifying predictions of the Civil War
in modern America, you're a weirdo. But but that podcast exists.

(01:07:13):
Maybe check it out. Um, that's that's all I got.
Uh love fantasticals.