April 13, 2023 • 45 mins
John Brinkley was perhaps the biggest quack who ever claimed to be practicing medicine. Learn all about this not so good guy today!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Attention, DC, Boston, Toronto and any place that can fly
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That's right, And I gotta say we've done this topic
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(00:21):
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sysk and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff you
should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,
So this is stuff you should have. Old timey history edition,
(00:44):
Quackery sub edition. Let's go. Yeah, we've covered a lot
of quacks over the years. It's kind of fun. I
want to shout out the listener who wrote in about
this one. This is where the idea came from, because
I had never heard of John our Brink, the famous
quack of the nineteen twenties and thirties, but you know
(01:05):
who did, and I'm gonna say I'm gonna spell it first.
His name is Matt s. E. J n O W
s Ki from Austin, Texas. And I wrote Matt back
and said, hey, man, we're gonna shout you out. Is
the N silent? I figured it was Sajowski and he
said the following, The N is not silent. The J
(01:26):
is like an H and the W was like an F.
So then he phonetically spelled out as uh Senofski. Oh wow,
there ain't no F in this thing. But it's uh
Matt's sinofsky. Very nice. That's a that's a new one
on me. So way to go, Matt, for your life. Yes,
so Matt, Matt's in this idea of John R. Brinkley,
(01:49):
who was a very famous and wealthy quack in the
nineteen twenties and thirties who um Olivia helped us put
this together, which is a great I'm sorry to Libya
for having to do this. But he had this procedure
called the goat gland procedure, yeah, which we'll get into
in more detail later, but just as a way of
setting it up, it's basically the practice of zeno transplantation.
(02:15):
And also Olivia wanted to shout out the book The
Bizarre Career of John R. Brinkley by R. Alton Lee
from two thousand and two, a great book and seems
to be the book on John R. Brinkley. But Zeno
transplantation is sort of what he was dabbling in, and
that's how we're going to start this thing out. Yeah,
which is a thing. It's just using organs or tissue
(02:37):
or whatever body parts from other species in humans, right,
So a pig heart trans zeno transplantation. And it's something
humans have been trying to crack for a little while
because we place such little value on animals that we
are like, well, let's just harvest them for parts for ourselves.
There's a lot of stuff that we've run into still
run into, like a specialized, weird exotic infections that you
(03:01):
can get just utterly rejecting your body, rejecting the organ
or the tissue and actually getting mad at you for
even trying it. But it's still going on, and there's
a long history of trying it that goes at least
back to the sixteen hundreds with a French physician named
Jean Baptiste Denis, which is a great French name, and
(03:22):
he started using blood from animals for blood transfusions. Yeah,
and I think that was kind of the first first
whirl at melding our two worlds our two bodies. And
they banned it for a while. It had mixed results,
and France said, now, you know, we shouldn't do this
for a while. Yeah, and this is this is seventeenth
century France yanally, so good for them. In the nineteenth
(03:46):
century they started messing around with skin grafts from different animals,
and it seems like the reports were like success rates
were mixed. But now we think modern medicine says, you know,
what it probably was was more like it didn't work
like a graph but sort of like a skin like
a band aid, while your skin underneath repaired itself, right,
(04:08):
if it worked at all, That's probably what was going on.
And they said we should just make band aids, make
them out of pigeon skin exactly. So one of the
other things is kind of like tangential to that, but
very much involved, is the idea that different parts of
different animals can give you, can can rejuvenate your vigor
(04:30):
or give you sexual vitality, you know, like make you strong,
like bowl kind of thing by eating bowls testicles. That's
the kind of the premise behind it, and it's not
technically zeno transplantation because you're not inserting it into your
body through like surgery, but by ingesting it. It is
kind of close as far as that whole thing goes.
(04:51):
I mean, you're really splitting hairs. If you're like, that's
not zeno transplantation, why are you even bringing that up? Yeah,
and this, you know, this factors into the eventual goat
glad procedure we're going to get to. That's why we
mentioned it. But that's why I brought it up. Yeah,
I mean, for since the ancient Romans, there have been
generally men that you know, something happens to men when
(05:12):
they get older. That's why they have ed drugs these days,
because you know, virility goes down and maybe a rectile
dysfunction happens. So this has always been the case, and
even in ancient Rome they realized this when they got older,
it was sort of a downhill slope sexually speaking, and
so they would do things like drink hawks, seamen or
eat rabbit genitalia and literally just sort of like eating
(05:36):
these things like you mentioned, eating bolt testicles or whatever
has always been a thing. It seems like that hawks
Seaman came out of nowhere, So apologies to anybody who
was eating breakfast right the good band name though, especially
if you were eating cereal with milk. All right, there
is a guy named Charles Eduard or sorry, Charles Eduard Brown,
(05:59):
how do you say brown? And En Francais Brown Sicard.
He injected himself with some serum that he squeezed from
the testicles of dogs and the testicles of guinea pigs,
and he said, by god, this is amazing. I feel
thirty years younger and I'm seventy two. I feel like
I'm clearly in my forties. And you guys got to
(06:21):
try this, and it's spread pretty quickly. But then the
other physicians are like, it's not making me feel anything
at all except grossed out, So this is probably just
a placebo effect that you were suffering from. They're like, still,
let's get back to it. Let's keep trying. And then
before Brinkley, not too long before, there was a pretty
legit doctor named Sergei Vornov who was doing surgeries where
(06:44):
he would use monkey testicles, as in transplant monkey testicles.
And this was in France, again in Paris, and then
eventually thyroid glands from like a chimpanzee trying to cure
thyroid deficiency. So again, this just idea of xeno transplantation
has been around for a long time before John Brinkley
(07:06):
was born in the hills of North Carolina in eighteen
eighty five. Yes, by the way, Sergei Vornov's work, I
think is what led to the monkey gland cocktail. Oh yeah, yeah, gin,
orange juice, grenadine and absinthe. It's named monkey glander talking
about that operation of getting monkey testicles implanted in you.
(07:27):
So they made a cocktail over it. That's probably a
safer approach. So Beta North Carolina, Beta North Carolina. It's
in the Appalachian Mountains. It's in Western North Carolina or WNC.
And he was born into an odd family arrangement. His
father was also named John, and he was a mountain
doctor and Appalachian folk doctor basically. And he was married
(07:49):
to a woman named Sally Mingus and they were happily
married apparently until Sarah Candice Burnett, who was known as Candice,
who was Sally's niece, came to live with them and
very quickly got pregnant by John Senior. She was twenty four,
he was fifty seven, and that's where John Romulus Brinkley
(08:09):
came from. Um and it just got hotter from there, right, yeah,
So John Junior then his mom is what would that
relation even be if it was, well, it wouldn't be
any relation to him, really, Sally mingus Well, no, no, nos,
his his his mom Sarah. That would be his mom. No, no, no.
(08:32):
But what I was trying to pin another an extra relation,
if you know what I mean, But there wouldn't be one,
because Sally wasn't even related to him, no, except by
marriage to his father. Right. Oh, you're saying no, you're right,
You're right. Yeah. No. I was about to be like, no,
it's his cousin, but you're absolutely right. She's There were
no like, yeah, no family shenanigans. But the long and
(08:54):
short of it is is that his his real mom, Sarah,
died at twenty four. John Senior died not too long
after that, and I believe by the time he was
ten years old he was in being raised by Sally,
who was his dad's wife. But no relation, right, Candice's aunt. Yeah,
din't that odd? It is? And it's not. We made
(09:15):
it more confusing than it is I don't think so. Okay,
So actually he was like Brinkley. He was one of
the great quacks of all time, like one of the
greatest ever to live. And he showed kind of an
early talent for quackery. He was a good student in school,
but he left at sixteen, ran off and got married,
and he and his first wife, Sally, they had a
(09:38):
medicine show, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're
hawking tonics that you just completely made up out a
whole cloth, but you're doing it by being super entertaining
and that kind of like m Olivia helped us with this,
like you said, and she, as she put it, it
kind of set the stage for his later career. He
only did it for about a year or so before
(09:58):
he went off and did some other ite or at work.
But apparently that was the bug that bit him all
the way back then when he was like twenty early twenties,
it was. And just to clear up the Sally who
was his wife, was not his lady who raised him,
Sally who was not his mom. No, although that really
would have completed the circle had it really would have.
(10:19):
And Libby also points out something that this was at
a time when the medical establishment was not super established yet,
so the mountain folk doctor was perhaps made way more
trustworthy than this modern, learned doctor who went to fancy
medical school and like, I don't want your your real
(10:41):
you know, medicines. I want a blood letting or a
purgative or some ither mectin or something. And it was
definitely one of those situations where I was like, Wow,
it's interesting how history can repeat itself all these years later.
I was going to say, I'm so glad we've moved
on from that after all these years. Exactly, it is crazy.
(11:01):
I mean, that's exactly what's going on. It's like, oh,
you're an expert. I don't trust you. I trust this
guy who's trying to put a crystal in my anus. Well,
there were a lot of weird similar similarities with his
story and like modern times to me. But I don't
want to delve into this too much. Okay, all right,
but let's still into medical school, which is what Brinkley
finally did at Bennett Medical College. It was what was
(11:25):
called an eclectic medical school, a lot of botanical remedies
and stuff like that, and it was back then it
was a genuine branch of medical practice. But what he
didn't know is that it was sort of like when
I went to my little NYU film school for two
summers and they taught me how to edit film on
the flatbed machine, and like six months later they threw
(11:47):
that all in the trash and said, now we're digital.
He went to Eclectic Medical School, and very soon after
they were like, you know what, we don't really count
that as medical school, and we're the AMA and we're
the deciders. Yeah. The Carnegie Foundation, I think, commissioned what
came to be known as the Flexner Report in nineteen ten,
which basically do a thing on that we will someday. Sure. Yeah,
(12:08):
but the Flexner Report basically said, we've just surveyed all
of modern medicine in the United States and it is
in sad shape. We basically suggest that you should follow
the biomedical model and feverishly stamp out any competition to it.
And that's kind of where the AMA went. Yeah, exactly.
So Brinkley now has this degree from Bennett College. He
(12:32):
it's not to say that it was a pure bunk
degree or anything like that. He did go to lectures
where there were real doctors. This one into chronologist Harry Hower.
I'm sorry. Henry Hower was an indo chronologist who taught him,
and he's where he sort of got the idea for
these glandular extracts, yeah, to heal the body. And I
(12:52):
believe that's where Brinkley was kind of like, all right,
let me put that in my hip pocket. Right. Harrower
was like, try this adreno chrome. It'll really mess you up.
So Brinkley was not a good guy. We'll just go
ahead and spoil that. Yeah, this isn't one of those
stories where it's like, oh, the guy took on the
medical establishment, or the guy was like a David and Goliath,
(13:14):
or you know, he persisted or persevered, or he was
just like a rapscallion who was still lovable. He was
a bad guy. And um, there's a really early example
of that where his marriage with Sally was on the
rocks and um, she filed for divorce. So he took
their daughter, Wanda, their first and only child at the time,
(13:35):
to Canada and basically held her hostage there until Sally
agreed to reunite with him. Yeah. That's called kidnapping. Yeah,
literal kid napping. Um, and that's a that's a good
example of the kind of thing that he would do.
And if you see pictures of this guy, he's got
almost like a slight Casper milktoast continge to him. But
(13:56):
he was not at all Casper milktoast. He was. He
was as he was, not a good guy. You'll see,
just just trust me. Yeah he got he's got a
bad look in his eye, you can tell, but like
he's got soft, soft, rounded face. Yeah he was. He
was a softy. He also married his second wife, Minnie Talitha,
(14:17):
when he was still married to Sally. I believe it
took a few years even where he had two wives
before he got formally divorced. So not a good guy
on the home front. He drops out of medical school
he never finished, I believe, and then ended up I
think he did end up finishing medical school, yeah, years
later at the eclectic Medical College of Kansas City in
(14:40):
nineteen fifteen. Didn't keep him from practicing doctoring in that
sort of interim period, but he and his wife, his
second wife, Millie, I'm sorry. Minie found an ad in
the paper in nineteen seventeen from Milford, Kansas that said, hey,
we're a small town two thousand people. We need a
doctor and someone to run our pharmacy. Many had her
(15:00):
own little dubious medical degree at this point, and so
they said, all right, we're gonna move to small town,
Kansas and be the town doctors. And that's what they did.
So they were the medical providers for this entire town.
I've seen two hundred people was the population at the time.
I've seen two thousand, but I saw two hundred on
like an old PBS documentary on this, so I'm going
(15:21):
to go with that one. I am going low. So
the Brinkley's provided care like they weren't. They didn't just
immediately start drifting the town. They actually did help see
them through the nineteen eighteen flu epidemic. They were fine,
like there was. People didn't have any real complaints about them.
(15:42):
And then, apparently just out of total happenstance, a farmer
showed up at the practice. This farmer went unnamed, but
this is supposedly the first goat gland patient, and it
was the farmer's idea to transplant coad. So remember other
people are trying this, it's not completely out of left field,
(16:02):
but it was the farmer's idea and from different accounts,
including one there's a documentary called Nuts with an exclamation
point that says that the doctor or the farmer kind
of had to talk Brinkley into it, that he was
revolted by the idea at first, and then the farmers like,
(16:22):
i'll pay you, and he's like, okay, sure, let's do it.
A you're gonna read the quote go ahead. So the
farmer I think Brinkley had made a joke about the
goats were so virile, and the farmer said, why he
didn't quote go ahead and put a pair of goat
glands in me transplant them. Grabbed him on the way
i'd grabbed a pound suite on an apple stray. I
(16:45):
don't know what any of that last part means. I
think a pound sweet is a type of apple, and
apple stray is like a wild apple sapling that's sprouting up,
so you want to make work out of it. Look
at you, Hey, I just totally made that up, and
I'm sure we'll get tons of listener mail saying jos
is so wrong, he couldn't be wronger. Actually, somehow an
apple stray is really offensive. Right, So Brinkley hesitated at first,
(17:12):
Like you mentioned, and then the farmer said, I'll even
bring you the testicles of the goat and put him
in my scrow to him, and that's what he did.
And so what we don't know is this farmer's name,
and so we don't really have a great idea of
how this really went because it's not officially on record.
Doesn't really matter they I mean, sure it mattered to him.
(17:34):
But the long and short of it is is that
this procedure happened, and word got around, and all of
a sudden a second patient stepped forward, mister William Stittsworth
and said, hey, I would like this goat thing too,
And Brinkley said, I'll want up you. I'll put some
goat testicles in you. I will put some goat ovaries
(17:55):
in your wife. And then Livia wrote the best sentence
she's ever written for us when she said, within a
year the couple had a child who, almost unbelievably, they
named Billy Billy the goat gland child. Oh wow, So
this was the start of something big. As Bert backrec
put it, yea, how much money was it? He charged
(18:17):
him seven fifty bucks just ten grand today, which if
this were a legitimate surgery, ten grand's not that bad
in today's money, right, a pretty good deal. But it
wasn't a legitimate surgery. It was a completely made up
surgery where basically he would take the testicles a slice
from a testicle of a young goat about three months old,
(18:38):
specifically a Toggenberg goat, which were these tiny, cute, very
clean kinds of goats that don't smell. I've seen or
I heard or I smelled, and they would He would
take these little slices of testicles, make an incision in
your scrowed them, put the testicle goat testicle slice in there,
(19:00):
so you back up ten fifteen minutes, you were done,
and that was it. He might as well put like
a Tonka truck or something in your scrotum. Like there
was nothing biologically happening to this except maybe increasing your
risk of infection, yeah, and genetic chimerism, where all of
a sudden you had Toggenberg goat DNA mixed in with
(19:20):
your own. Yeah. So it's not like he was when
we said testicles. He wasn't surgically attaching testicles to blood
vessels or anything like that. He told people that he
was attaching blood vessels, but he would. I'm surprised he
even bothered to put the slice testicle in there, to
be honest, Well, he had some honor. He also had
(19:46):
a pretty good eye for advertising. And maybe that's a
good place to take a break. Oh yeah, all right,
we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna talk about
how he sort of revolutionized PR in a way right
after this stuff. You should know, all right, so we
(20:29):
mentioned he's doing this goat gland procedure, Brinkley is he's
a quack. He hired an advertising consultant and then later
on when hire a PR person, and these were this
was sort of the beginnings of this kind of job
in the United States, and started to get the word
out in newspapers such that he got some pretty prominent
patients in there, didn't he He did, And the one
(20:52):
that really paid off the most was a guy named
Harry Chandler. And thanks to his press, I mean, he
got some crazy press throughout the country. His name became very,
very famous, and people started traveling to Milford. And because
of this this you know, renown, this publisher or owner
actually of the Los Angeles Times put himself up as
(21:15):
a patient. And I've seen either he put himself up
or one of his editors up as a patient and said,
here's the deal. If this is successful, we will sing
your praises forever in the Los Angeles Times, which will
legitimize you in ways you can't even imagine. If it's
not successful, we're going to ruin you. What do you
want to do? And he did it. He worked on
either Harry Chandler or his editor, and it worked in
(21:38):
whatever way this could possibly work, and the LA Times
started singing the praises of doctor Brinkley, and he went
from kind of famous to a global superstars as far
as like a quack can get. Yeah. And also, Keyhan
put a pin in this. Harry Chandler own Los Angeles'
first radio station, KHJ, And this will all kind of
(22:02):
come back into focus in a minute. But things really
picked up. Brinkley built his own sixteen bed hospital in Milford, Kansas,
a town of either two hundred or two thousand, but
it was the population was rising at least by sixteen
because I get the feeling those beds were always full
of men who wanted these Arkan assassin Arkanson arkans and
(22:26):
goats which he kept out back. And you would walk
you out there. You can say, you can even pick
out your goat. Who I mean, did he was he
killing these goats? I couldn't find any ink um what
happened to I have to surmise that he did because
he would order forty or fifty him at a time,
and once he took their testicles, there were worth nothing
(22:47):
to him. Why would he keep them alive? So yeah,
I think all these goats died. Yeah, that's the worst
part of this whole thing. So pick out your goat,
will put these testicles in you, or at least part
of them. And not only is it good for this,
but sort of like with the medicine shows in the
quackery of snake oil salesman, he's like he rattled off
(23:09):
a list of other things that it would help, right,
like schizophrenia, diabetes, high blood pressure. Apparently he did a
goat ovary procedure to treat a spinal tumor on a woman.
Basically anything that could be wrong with you. He said,
this goat glam procedure is going to help. Yeah. And
then in addition, remember he was an eclectic medical practitioner,
(23:32):
so he was into herbs and tonics and tinctures and
stuff like that, and he sold patent medicines as well,
at a time where you could make a lot of
money selling patent medicine. So he had this thriving surgical
practice that people would travel to Kansas to participate in.
And then he was also selling patent medicines too, So
he was doing pretty well for himself by this time,
(23:54):
this is the mid twenties. Yeah, and spoiler, by the
end of this thing, he was a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy
human being. I saw between nineteen thirty three and thirty
eight he made twelve million dollars and that I did
the old West egg converter. Of course, two hundred and
fifty six million dollars is what that's equal to today.
(24:16):
This guy was made that from a made up procedure
that didn't do anything. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And again
one of the reasons why is because he ended up
becoming kind of a media pioneer. He made his name
in this goat gland operation, but he did a lot
of innovative things. In the early nineteen twenties, he made
(24:36):
a film called Rejuvenation through Gland Transplantation. You think big whop,
it's a it's a movie that touts his practice. But
this was nineteen twenty two that people weren't really using
film for this stuff at the time, So he was
one of the first, I guess it was one of
the first kind of infomercials basically yeah, And so he
(24:56):
bought a radio station, actually created a radio station, KFKB,
Kansas first Kansas Best. It was the first radio station
in Kansas and just the fourth in the United States.
This is nineteen twenty three. And one of the things
he would do would be basically like you just described infomercials,
but on radio about his treatments, his patent medicines. He
(25:17):
also had other stuff too, where he would have like
in No Brother, where art Thou like the Sea Route
was bringing Yes, it was bringing in like this country
acts and recording him and playing him on the radio.
This is the exact same thing. And because it had
a fairly large reach for its size, people started picking
up on this and gibing on it, and he would
(25:38):
get something like three thousand letters a week, and based
on these letters, he would diagnose people on his show
The Medical Question Box. Right. Sorry, I was just thinking
about Stephen Root in that movie out Over the top
of his performance. Yeah, that's pretty good everything, okay, man,
it was really great. Yeah. So he would have his
(25:59):
medical question box segment and put a pin in this
one too, because he would literally diagnose people on the air,
had a network of pharmacists across the country where he
would say, go to you know, if you're in Chicago, whatever,
go to this doctor and get this drug or this
tonic or whatever and start using it. Yep. And he
would get a cut from it because it was his
patent medicine. And then the pharmacists would charge like way
(26:21):
more than you would for other kinds of patent medicines
because it was a Brinkley patent medicine, so you could. Right.
So he's getting all this attention. He's making a big
name for himself. He's got infomercials in via film, a radio,
and he made a little bit too big of a
fuss over himself. Because as he is, his star is rising.
(26:45):
People start getting a little smarter about medicine. The AMA
starts to sort of crack down a little more on quackery,
and things are getting a little more legitimized. Right at
the time, this super illegit him at doctor has his
star rising, and in nineteen twenty three there were investigations
(27:06):
into not just his college but all the kind of
eclectic medical colleges. And he even was like they tried
to arrest him for practicing medicine at one point. Yeah,
when he went to California to treat Harry Chandler, the
owner of the La Times. Afterwards, California tried to get him. So,
like he had the medical establishment, He had this this
(27:28):
guy named Morris Fishbeine, the editor of the Journal of
the American Medical Association, which was still very young at
the time, beating the drum to like, like, go get
that guy. This guy is a quack. He's making tons
of money off these really risky procedures that don't do anything.
And so he had like everybody who had anything to
do with the medical establishment now was after him. Basically, Yeah,
(27:52):
I got the idea from this and other research that Fishbeine.
I don't think he was consumed with Brinkley, but I
think he really had it out for him as this
top quack he was making tons of money. I think
he really wanted to take him down. He really did.
He wrote an editorial in nineteen thirty and he described
(28:13):
Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort, and he
used his radio station to victimize people and to enrich himself. Yeah,
and so they basically, the Kansas Medical Board had no
choice but to go after him because the Journal of
the American Medical Association is saying this guy is a
prominent quack practicing in Kansas. So Kansas had to do something.
(28:36):
So apparently, in nineteen thirty they sent a contingency from
the Kansas Medical Board to watch him perform a couple
of surgeries, and Brinkley went along with it. He performed
two surgeries for them. One of them later remarked that
his surgical techniques were excellent, where his skills were excellent.
And then they went back to Kansas City and the
(28:57):
next day they revoked his medical license after seeing him
perform two surgeries. Yeah, they're like, you were a clearly
skilled surgeon who is out of his mind. Right, And
I watched this nineteen eighty six PBS documentary on him,
and in it they have many interviewed his wife, who
is totally in on this as much as he is,
(29:18):
and she was recounting that story where they went back
to Kansas City. The next day and they revoked his license,
and she was telling the story and kind of like
a homespun country heck kind of way, you know, But
she just thought it was pretty funny. That was that
was my country laugh that I just did. And so
like she was completely in on it. She was not
(29:39):
at all like being duped herself. She was she was
totally in on this whole act. Yeah, so they that
hospital stays open in Milford. Even though his licenses were revoked.
He had colleagues that were still doing the surgeries. He
was getting his cut. Eventually, what's going to happen, of course,
is some of those colleagues going to be like, well,
why am I I know how to do this thing? Now?
Why am I paying this guy part of my money?
(30:00):
I'm gonna go open up my own shop. And that's
what om Owensby did. He went one hundred miles away
in wrote Rosalia, Kansas and said I'm gonna do it
for six hundred bucks. And so Brinkley said, oh, yeah,
I'm going to open up a sanatorium across the street
from your place, and I'm just going to start injecting
people with a secret serum that says does the same
(30:21):
thing as a surgery, and I'm gonna do it for
two hundred bucks. Yes, And so Owensby is a good
example of what he would do. He would alienate his
colleagues because he would do things like bite their ear
off when they tried to keep him from stabbing a patient.
He would he went on huge drinking binges, and they
would keep practicing while ruinously drunk, and would try to
(30:42):
kill people. He pulled a gun on some of his
early patients in Milford to force them to pay a
medical bill. He chased somebody else, another patient out of
the hospital with a knife. So he had a terrible
reputation for violence, especially locally and among some of the
colleagues that he worked with. So it's not really surprised
that anybody went off and like did their own their
(31:03):
own chicanery themselves to kind of compete with him. Yeah,
so what happens, of course, as Brinkley says here, I am.
I'm a successful, wealthy carnival barker and charlatan who is
as good at duping people and who has all these
questionable ideas about modern medicine. And so I'm going to
(31:25):
get into politics and run for governor because I think
people will buy what I'm laying down and we'll take
a break and tell you how that went. Right after
this stuff, you should know, okay, Chuck, So if you're
(32:05):
not practicing quack medicine, you should just get into politics.
It's virtually the same thing, right, sure, So not to
get political or anything, but um so he ran for
governor in nineteen thirty. And remember this guy is famous nationwide,
if not internationally, and he actually he was a write
in candidate, so he if you he was a bad guy,
(32:29):
but he had good politics. He ran on something that
you could call proto New Deal platform, which he called
sympathy for the masses, which was good pay for workers,
pensions for people who like social security, basically free medical
care for the poor and indigent, and like, it was
(32:50):
not a bad platform at all, especially coming from a
really bad guy. So it's almost like he he was
a true believer in his own Paul politics. I think
I don't know that he was necessarily doing it to
fleece the masses, although I'm sure he would have when
he became governor. But he was running at a time
where again people distrusted the people in charge, whether it
(33:13):
was the experts at the AMA or the people who
had been running Kansas and then Washington, and he was
running as this everyman who who was not an expert,
hated experts just as much as the rest of you,
had no experience, but was still a great leader. And
so he got voted for. I think he got something
(33:33):
like one hundred and eighty three thousand votes out of
six hundred thousand. He came in third as a writing candidate. Yeah,
And apparently the writing part was a little hinky in
that the Kansas Attorney General didn't like him and made
it such where if the vote were to count, it
had to be written exactly as follows, capital J period,
(33:56):
capital R period, Brinkley, and if he wrote even I
get the idea even if you just wrote JR. Without
the periods, Yeah, that it wouldn't count. So people look
back and say, he may have even gotten another fifty
thousand votes that didn't count for him. Yet he did
(34:16):
not contest the election results, which is kind of surprising,
and even ran again in nineteen thirty two, again coming
in third place. And that's where it seems like his
political career kind of wound up. Yeah, he said forget
it after that, So he lost his medical license. Remember,
the Kansas Medical Board said you're you're done with this
(34:38):
and because of his use of his radio station is
diagnosing people over the airwaves, just based on letters they
wrote to him. The Federal Radio Commission, the predecessor to
the FCC, said you don't have a radio license any
longer either. KFKB is no longer on the error. So
(34:59):
he did something that it was kind of a trend
around this time in the late twenties early thirties. He
decamped to Mexico, just across the Rio Grand from Texas
and set up what were what was called the border
buster radio station, which was so powerful that it would
overwhelm local radio stations using the same frequency in other
(35:20):
parts of the country. It was that it was like
the loudest shout a radio station could do. And as
a matter of fact, xcr A, which it was the
radio station he founded, was for a time the most
powerful radio station in the entire world. Yeah, it was.
By nineteen thirty eight. It was a five hundred thousand
watch broadcast signal. And if you've got one hundred thousand
(35:44):
WAT radio station like that's I don't know, all the
exact numbers, but that's that's a big market radio station wattage.
These days, right, the biggest most powerful radio station in
the world right now is four hundred and fifty thousand watts,
So that's that's less. Yes, it's a huge outlier. It's
some shy in eight hundreds is a religious station from
(36:05):
bon Air in the Caribbean. Interesting, but I saw Chuck
that UM they could actually boost XCRA to one million
watts from one point. So it was just crazy powerful
and potent. And he was using this to to not
just further his own UM agenda, but he also helped
(36:26):
country music, not just him, but some other like radio
stations around the country that were kind of rogue radio stations.
UM they would put what they called hillbilly music on
and would um would It kind of gave country music
like a foothole in the United States at the time. Yeah,
because radio, you know, like the radio of the East basically,
(36:48):
UM was a little more sophisticated. You know, they're playing
like jazz and like the you know, the the whatever,
you know, town singers and the choirs and things like
that in the symphony. But he started playing country music
and was able to sort of break bands like a
you know, like a regular radio DJ would This quack
(37:10):
doctor who moved to Mexico to broadcast his medical quackery
all of a sudden is like one of the first
I guess DJs for lack of a better word, to
play things like the Carter Family. Right, So he actually
stayed in Texas, right across the border from Acunia, Mexico,
(37:30):
where his radio station was, and he set up shop again.
He's like, well, Kansas said I couldn't practice medicine, but
Texas hasn't said that yet. And you said that he
kind of he dropped the goat gland procedure. He did.
He replaced it with something else he called formula ten
twenty and rather than increased shady at all. No, no,
(37:52):
I looked it up today. Formula ten twenty refers to
a mosquito spray, a pressure washer concentrate for a solution
for circulating cooling water. Yeah, not the kind of stuff
you'd want injected into you. And he sold it for
one hundred bucks for the six shot course that you needed.
And this was not for sexual virility. This was to
(38:12):
treat prostate glance, which I remember that was his first specialty.
He kind of came back full circle and started focusing
on the prostate instead of sexual virility. And that was
the first pillar of his downfall. He moved from sexual
virility to the prostate. Just keep that in mind. Yeah,
And the reason why that was his first downfall was
(38:34):
because his old nemesis, Fishbine gets wind that Brinkley's career
is kicked back in in Texas and said, well, you
know what, the problem that I had with the previous
operation was I couldn't get the enough men to come
forward because they were embarrassed that they got this operation
to begin with. So I didn't have this roster of
(38:56):
people that were like wanted to sue him maybe into
oblivion in But now that he's working on something less embarrassing,
I do have people that'll come forward. Yes. By this time,
I think in nineteen thirty eight, Brinkley had moved from
Texas to Arkansas. Apparently he'd get medicaled up pretty easily
in Arkansas at the time, and fish Mind published an
(39:17):
article in the AMA magazine and what is it Hygia? Yeah,
it's a terrible name. It's a terrible name, where he
again was denouncing Brinkley. Brinkley sued for libel, and that
was a big mistake because at this trial he had to,
like under oath, basically admit that the goat gland surgery
(39:38):
was bunk. That was suing Fishbeine was the second pillar
to his downfall, and like, that was such a bad move.
And I don't know if he felt either indignant and
lost his head about it, I think, or he felt
like he had to defend himself or else he was
basically tacitly agreeing that he was a charlatan or quack.
I don't know, sort of the hubris of their wealthy too.
(39:59):
You know, I could see that because again he's got
a quarter of a billion dollars at the time. I
could see him just thinking that he's unlike anyone else.
So yeah, it probably was hubris. So on the stand
he admitted that, yes, he knew that the goat clanned
operation didn't work. And he lost that case and he
took it to the Court of Appeals and the appellate
(40:20):
court said this quote he was indeed a charlatan and
a quack in the ordinary, well understood meaning of those words,
like you well know what that means. So Therefore, Fishbine
could not have been engaged in libel because the court
found that he actually was a quack, He actually was
a charlatan. So now not only was the editor of
the journal of the American Medical Association saying he was
(40:42):
a quack, an appellate court in I think Texas said
the same thing. So he fell pretty hard, pretty quickly
from that moment on he did. Now, this opened him
up for malpractice suits. I believe three million bucks and
damages back then as about sixty plus million today. He
(41:03):
had his radio station still until the Mexican government came
along and confiscated XCRA again for you know, just radio malpractice,
I guess. And he started to suffer health problems when
he lost our radio station. That was a big emotional
blow to him. He suffered what's called a coronary occlusion,
(41:25):
big time heart trouble. He didn't rest like the real
doctor said he should. He got a blood clot that
went to his leg. That leg was amputated, and then
his family fell into bankruptcy in the nineteen forties, right, Yeah,
from all the lawsuits that he was having to defend
them pay off. Then finally in Little Rock, Arkansas, a
(41:46):
grand jury indicted him from mail fraud along with many
and then six other members of his medical practice, and
he never made it to trial. He died before it
could come to trial. He died on twenty six, nineteen
forty two, So he's never actually convicted of anything as
far as I can tell. He just lost a civil
case and then was definitely about to be convicted of
(42:08):
mail fraud, but he died before he could be Yeah,
what is that fifty seven years old? Yeah? Not that
not that old, Yeah, not that old. And that is
uh yeah, that's John Brinkley story. Yep. Could be a movie,
but I feel like movies like this don't do well.
So they didn't even make him anymore. Noo. He's not
at all sympathetic, and if you made him sympathetic, you
(42:30):
would be using a lot of license. Well, I think
it might have to be told through the lens of fishbine.
Oh I guess so, I guess so sure? The dogged
Pursuer of Truth Yeah, played by Sam Rockwell. Yeah, although
Brockwell seems like he could have been Brinkley. Oh he
could do either one. Why don't you just make him both?
Pay him one pay one salary to hard. Yes. Okay, Well,
(42:56):
since we came up with the great um structure to
a movie on this, I say it's time for a
listener man. All right, hey guys, a longtime listener. I
recently moved to Nashville for work, so I was excited
when the Grand ol Opry episode came out. This is
an old one. Attended my first show at the Rieman
just a few weeks ago and really enjoyed the episode.
But I got a promotional email from the Riemen with
(43:17):
a feature called celebrating the Women of the Rieman's History,
and I want to tell you about Lula sed Naff,
who was responsible for bringing the Grand ol Opry to
the Rheman Theater. She was definitely making her own way
in a man's world, often going by lc Naff, and
her gargantuan contributions to the music scene in Nashville seemed
to be all but forgotten. She was working as a
(43:38):
bookkeeper for an agency that booked performances at the Riemen.
When the agency dissolved. The widow Lula needed a way
to continue to provide for a daughter an aging mother,
so she convinced the Rieman's board to let her rent
the space and put on the events. Lula recalled herself
an unreconstructed rebel and was known for being difficult, but
the Rieman's Museum curator says she got the building out
(44:00):
of debt, brought a powerful variety to the building state,
and defended the public's right to see whatever entertainment they desired.
When she challenged the Board of sensors attempt to block
a performance, it seemed like a real rock star and
that is great additional information from Katie. Thanks a lot,
Katie appreciate that. We definitely I don't recall her name
(44:23):
at all, do you. I don't think so, But Lula
sounds like she might deserve her own episode or a
movie starring Sam Rockwell that's right. Well, if you want
to get in touch with this, like Katie, right, yep,
did you can email us? Thanks by the way, Katie
at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff You Should
(44:49):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listening to your favorite shows
Attention, DC, Boston, Toronto and any place that can fly
to those cities. We're gonna be live on stage doing
our thing again. I'm May fourth, fifth, and sixth this year.
That's right, And I gotta say we've done this topic
a few times already and it's a real banger and
we can't wait to come to your city and have
you see it with us. We're so excited and we
(00:21):
just can't hide it. So go to link tree, slash
sysk and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff you
should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,
So this is stuff you should have. Old timey history edition,
(00:44):
Quackery sub edition. Let's go. Yeah, we've covered a lot
of quacks over the years. It's kind of fun. I
want to shout out the listener who wrote in about
this one. This is where the idea came from, because
I had never heard of John our Brink, the famous
quack of the nineteen twenties and thirties, but you know
(01:05):
who did, and I'm gonna say I'm gonna spell it first.
His name is Matt s. E. J n O W
s Ki from Austin, Texas. And I wrote Matt back
and said, hey, man, we're gonna shout you out. Is
the N silent? I figured it was Sajowski and he
said the following, The N is not silent. The J
(01:26):
is like an H and the W was like an F.
So then he phonetically spelled out as uh Senofski. Oh wow,
there ain't no F in this thing. But it's uh
Matt's sinofsky. Very nice. That's a that's a new one
on me. So way to go, Matt, for your life. Yes,
so Matt, Matt's in this idea of John R. Brinkley,
(01:49):
who was a very famous and wealthy quack in the
nineteen twenties and thirties who um Olivia helped us put
this together, which is a great I'm sorry to Libya
for having to do this. But he had this procedure
called the goat gland procedure, yeah, which we'll get into
in more detail later, but just as a way of
setting it up, it's basically the practice of zeno transplantation.
(02:15):
And also Olivia wanted to shout out the book The
Bizarre Career of John R. Brinkley by R. Alton Lee
from two thousand and two, a great book and seems
to be the book on John R. Brinkley. But Zeno
transplantation is sort of what he was dabbling in, and
that's how we're going to start this thing out. Yeah,
which is a thing. It's just using organs or tissue
(02:37):
or whatever body parts from other species in humans, right,
So a pig heart trans zeno transplantation. And it's something
humans have been trying to crack for a little while
because we place such little value on animals that we
are like, well, let's just harvest them for parts for ourselves.
There's a lot of stuff that we've run into still
run into, like a specialized, weird exotic infections that you
(03:01):
can get just utterly rejecting your body, rejecting the organ
or the tissue and actually getting mad at you for
even trying it. But it's still going on, and there's
a long history of trying it that goes at least
back to the sixteen hundreds with a French physician named
Jean Baptiste Denis, which is a great French name, and
(03:22):
he started using blood from animals for blood transfusions. Yeah,
and I think that was kind of the first first
whirl at melding our two worlds our two bodies. And
they banned it for a while. It had mixed results,
and France said, now, you know, we shouldn't do this
for a while. Yeah, and this is this is seventeenth
century France yanally, so good for them. In the nineteenth
(03:46):
century they started messing around with skin grafts from different animals,
and it seems like the reports were like success rates
were mixed. But now we think modern medicine says, you know,
what it probably was was more like it didn't work
like a graph but sort of like a skin like
a band aid, while your skin underneath repaired itself, right,
(04:08):
if it worked at all, That's probably what was going on.
And they said we should just make band aids, make
them out of pigeon skin exactly. So one of the
other things is kind of like tangential to that, but
very much involved, is the idea that different parts of
different animals can give you, can can rejuvenate your vigor
(04:30):
or give you sexual vitality, you know, like make you strong,
like bowl kind of thing by eating bowls testicles. That's
the kind of the premise behind it, and it's not
technically zeno transplantation because you're not inserting it into your
body through like surgery, but by ingesting it. It is
kind of close as far as that whole thing goes.
(04:51):
I mean, you're really splitting hairs. If you're like, that's
not zeno transplantation, why are you even bringing that up? Yeah,
and this, you know, this factors into the eventual goat
glad procedure we're going to get to. That's why we
mentioned it. But that's why I brought it up. Yeah,
I mean, for since the ancient Romans, there have been
generally men that you know, something happens to men when
(05:12):
they get older. That's why they have ed drugs these days,
because you know, virility goes down and maybe a rectile
dysfunction happens. So this has always been the case, and
even in ancient Rome they realized this when they got older,
it was sort of a downhill slope sexually speaking, and
so they would do things like drink hawks, seamen or
eat rabbit genitalia and literally just sort of like eating
(05:36):
these things like you mentioned, eating bolt testicles or whatever
has always been a thing. It seems like that hawks
Seaman came out of nowhere, So apologies to anybody who
was eating breakfast right the good band name though, especially
if you were eating cereal with milk. All right, there
is a guy named Charles Eduard or sorry, Charles Eduard Brown,
(05:59):
how do you say brown? And En Francais Brown Sicard.
He injected himself with some serum that he squeezed from
the testicles of dogs and the testicles of guinea pigs,
and he said, by god, this is amazing. I feel
thirty years younger and I'm seventy two. I feel like
I'm clearly in my forties. And you guys got to
(06:21):
try this, and it's spread pretty quickly. But then the
other physicians are like, it's not making me feel anything
at all except grossed out, So this is probably just
a placebo effect that you were suffering from. They're like, still,
let's get back to it. Let's keep trying. And then
before Brinkley, not too long before, there was a pretty
legit doctor named Sergei Vornov who was doing surgeries where
(06:44):
he would use monkey testicles, as in transplant monkey testicles.
And this was in France, again in Paris, and then
eventually thyroid glands from like a chimpanzee trying to cure
thyroid deficiency. So again, this just idea of xeno transplantation
has been around for a long time before John Brinkley
(07:06):
was born in the hills of North Carolina in eighteen
eighty five. Yes, by the way, Sergei Vornov's work, I
think is what led to the monkey gland cocktail. Oh yeah, yeah, gin,
orange juice, grenadine and absinthe. It's named monkey glander talking
about that operation of getting monkey testicles implanted in you.
(07:27):
So they made a cocktail over it. That's probably a
safer approach. So Beta North Carolina, Beta North Carolina. It's
in the Appalachian Mountains. It's in Western North Carolina or WNC.
And he was born into an odd family arrangement. His
father was also named John, and he was a mountain
doctor and Appalachian folk doctor basically. And he was married
(07:49):
to a woman named Sally Mingus and they were happily
married apparently until Sarah Candice Burnett, who was known as Candice,
who was Sally's niece, came to live with them and
very quickly got pregnant by John Senior. She was twenty four,
he was fifty seven, and that's where John Romulus Brinkley
(08:09):
came from. Um and it just got hotter from there, right, yeah,
So John Junior then his mom is what would that
relation even be if it was, well, it wouldn't be
any relation to him, really, Sally mingus Well, no, no, nos,
his his his mom Sarah. That would be his mom. No, no, no.
(08:32):
But what I was trying to pin another an extra relation,
if you know what I mean, But there wouldn't be one,
because Sally wasn't even related to him, no, except by
marriage to his father. Right. Oh, you're saying no, you're right,
You're right. Yeah. No. I was about to be like, no,
it's his cousin, but you're absolutely right. She's There were
no like, yeah, no family shenanigans. But the long and
(08:54):
short of it is is that his his real mom, Sarah,
died at twenty four. John Senior died not too long
after that, and I believe by the time he was
ten years old he was in being raised by Sally,
who was his dad's wife. But no relation, right, Candice's aunt. Yeah,
din't that odd? It is? And it's not. We made
(09:15):
it more confusing than it is I don't think so. Okay,
So actually he was like Brinkley. He was one of
the great quacks of all time, like one of the
greatest ever to live. And he showed kind of an
early talent for quackery. He was a good student in school,
but he left at sixteen, ran off and got married,
and he and his first wife, Sally, they had a
(09:38):
medicine show, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're
hawking tonics that you just completely made up out a
whole cloth, but you're doing it by being super entertaining
and that kind of like m Olivia helped us with this,
like you said, and she, as she put it, it
kind of set the stage for his later career. He
only did it for about a year or so before
(09:58):
he went off and did some other ite or at work.
But apparently that was the bug that bit him all
the way back then when he was like twenty early twenties,
it was. And just to clear up the Sally who
was his wife, was not his lady who raised him,
Sally who was not his mom. No, although that really
would have completed the circle had it really would have.
(10:19):
And Libby also points out something that this was at
a time when the medical establishment was not super established yet,
so the mountain folk doctor was perhaps made way more
trustworthy than this modern, learned doctor who went to fancy
medical school and like, I don't want your your real
(10:41):
you know, medicines. I want a blood letting or a
purgative or some ither mectin or something. And it was
definitely one of those situations where I was like, Wow,
it's interesting how history can repeat itself all these years later.
I was going to say, I'm so glad we've moved
on from that after all these years. Exactly, it is crazy.
(11:01):
I mean, that's exactly what's going on. It's like, oh,
you're an expert. I don't trust you. I trust this
guy who's trying to put a crystal in my anus. Well,
there were a lot of weird similar similarities with his
story and like modern times to me. But I don't
want to delve into this too much. Okay, all right,
but let's still into medical school, which is what Brinkley
finally did at Bennett Medical College. It was what was
(11:25):
called an eclectic medical school, a lot of botanical remedies
and stuff like that, and it was back then it
was a genuine branch of medical practice. But what he
didn't know is that it was sort of like when
I went to my little NYU film school for two
summers and they taught me how to edit film on
the flatbed machine, and like six months later they threw
(11:47):
that all in the trash and said, now we're digital.
He went to Eclectic Medical School, and very soon after
they were like, you know what, we don't really count
that as medical school, and we're the AMA and we're
the deciders. Yeah. The Carnegie Foundation, I think, commissioned what
came to be known as the Flexner Report in nineteen ten,
which basically do a thing on that we will someday. Sure. Yeah,
(12:08):
but the Flexner Report basically said, we've just surveyed all
of modern medicine in the United States and it is
in sad shape. We basically suggest that you should follow
the biomedical model and feverishly stamp out any competition to it.
And that's kind of where the AMA went. Yeah, exactly.
So Brinkley now has this degree from Bennett College. He
(12:32):
it's not to say that it was a pure bunk
degree or anything like that. He did go to lectures
where there were real doctors. This one into chronologist Harry Hower.
I'm sorry. Henry Hower was an indo chronologist who taught him,
and he's where he sort of got the idea for
these glandular extracts, yeah, to heal the body. And I
(12:52):
believe that's where Brinkley was kind of like, all right,
let me put that in my hip pocket. Right. Harrower
was like, try this adreno chrome. It'll really mess you up.
So Brinkley was not a good guy. We'll just go
ahead and spoil that. Yeah, this isn't one of those
stories where it's like, oh, the guy took on the
medical establishment, or the guy was like a David and Goliath,
(13:14):
or you know, he persisted or persevered, or he was
just like a rapscallion who was still lovable. He was
a bad guy. And um, there's a really early example
of that where his marriage with Sally was on the
rocks and um, she filed for divorce. So he took
their daughter, Wanda, their first and only child at the time,
(13:35):
to Canada and basically held her hostage there until Sally
agreed to reunite with him. Yeah. That's called kidnapping. Yeah,
literal kid napping. Um, and that's a that's a good
example of the kind of thing that he would do.
And if you see pictures of this guy, he's got
almost like a slight Casper milktoast continge to him. But
(13:56):
he was not at all Casper milktoast. He was. He
was as he was, not a good guy. You'll see,
just just trust me. Yeah he got he's got a
bad look in his eye, you can tell, but like
he's got soft, soft, rounded face. Yeah he was. He
was a softy. He also married his second wife, Minnie Talitha,
(14:17):
when he was still married to Sally. I believe it
took a few years even where he had two wives
before he got formally divorced. So not a good guy
on the home front. He drops out of medical school
he never finished, I believe, and then ended up I
think he did end up finishing medical school, yeah, years
later at the eclectic Medical College of Kansas City in
(14:40):
nineteen fifteen. Didn't keep him from practicing doctoring in that
sort of interim period, but he and his wife, his
second wife, Millie, I'm sorry. Minie found an ad in
the paper in nineteen seventeen from Milford, Kansas that said, hey,
we're a small town two thousand people. We need a
doctor and someone to run our pharmacy. Many had her
(15:00):
own little dubious medical degree at this point, and so
they said, all right, we're gonna move to small town,
Kansas and be the town doctors. And that's what they did.
So they were the medical providers for this entire town.
I've seen two hundred people was the population at the time.
I've seen two thousand, but I saw two hundred on
like an old PBS documentary on this, so I'm going
(15:21):
to go with that one. I am going low. So
the Brinkley's provided care like they weren't. They didn't just
immediately start drifting the town. They actually did help see
them through the nineteen eighteen flu epidemic. They were fine,
like there was. People didn't have any real complaints about them.
(15:42):
And then, apparently just out of total happenstance, a farmer
showed up at the practice. This farmer went unnamed, but
this is supposedly the first goat gland patient, and it
was the farmer's idea to transplant coad. So remember other
people are trying this, it's not completely out of left field,
(16:02):
but it was the farmer's idea and from different accounts,
including one there's a documentary called Nuts with an exclamation
point that says that the doctor or the farmer kind
of had to talk Brinkley into it, that he was
revolted by the idea at first, and then the farmers like,
(16:22):
i'll pay you, and he's like, okay, sure, let's do it.
A you're gonna read the quote go ahead. So the
farmer I think Brinkley had made a joke about the
goats were so virile, and the farmer said, why he
didn't quote go ahead and put a pair of goat
glands in me transplant them. Grabbed him on the way
i'd grabbed a pound suite on an apple stray. I
(16:45):
don't know what any of that last part means. I
think a pound sweet is a type of apple, and
apple stray is like a wild apple sapling that's sprouting up,
so you want to make work out of it. Look
at you, Hey, I just totally made that up, and
I'm sure we'll get tons of listener mail saying jos
is so wrong, he couldn't be wronger. Actually, somehow an
apple stray is really offensive. Right, So Brinkley hesitated at first,
(17:12):
Like you mentioned, and then the farmer said, I'll even
bring you the testicles of the goat and put him
in my scrow to him, and that's what he did.
And so what we don't know is this farmer's name,
and so we don't really have a great idea of
how this really went because it's not officially on record.
Doesn't really matter they I mean, sure it mattered to him.
(17:34):
But the long and short of it is is that
this procedure happened, and word got around, and all of
a sudden a second patient stepped forward, mister William Stittsworth
and said, hey, I would like this goat thing too,
And Brinkley said, I'll want up you. I'll put some
goat testicles in you. I will put some goat ovaries
(17:55):
in your wife. And then Livia wrote the best sentence
she's ever written for us when she said, within a
year the couple had a child who, almost unbelievably, they
named Billy Billy the goat gland child. Oh wow, So
this was the start of something big. As Bert backrec
put it, yea, how much money was it? He charged
(18:17):
him seven fifty bucks just ten grand today, which if
this were a legitimate surgery, ten grand's not that bad
in today's money, right, a pretty good deal. But it
wasn't a legitimate surgery. It was a completely made up
surgery where basically he would take the testicles a slice
from a testicle of a young goat about three months old,
(18:38):
specifically a Toggenberg goat, which were these tiny, cute, very
clean kinds of goats that don't smell. I've seen or
I heard or I smelled, and they would He would
take these little slices of testicles, make an incision in
your scrowed them, put the testicle goat testicle slice in there,
(19:00):
so you back up ten fifteen minutes, you were done,
and that was it. He might as well put like
a Tonka truck or something in your scrotum. Like there
was nothing biologically happening to this except maybe increasing your
risk of infection, yeah, and genetic chimerism, where all of
a sudden you had Toggenberg goat DNA mixed in with
(19:20):
your own. Yeah. So it's not like he was when
we said testicles. He wasn't surgically attaching testicles to blood
vessels or anything like that. He told people that he
was attaching blood vessels, but he would. I'm surprised he
even bothered to put the slice testicle in there, to
be honest, Well, he had some honor. He also had
(19:46):
a pretty good eye for advertising. And maybe that's a
good place to take a break. Oh yeah, all right,
we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna talk about
how he sort of revolutionized PR in a way right
after this stuff. You should know, all right, so we
(20:29):
mentioned he's doing this goat gland procedure, Brinkley is he's
a quack. He hired an advertising consultant and then later
on when hire a PR person, and these were this
was sort of the beginnings of this kind of job
in the United States, and started to get the word
out in newspapers such that he got some pretty prominent
patients in there, didn't he He did, And the one
(20:52):
that really paid off the most was a guy named
Harry Chandler. And thanks to his press, I mean, he
got some crazy press throughout the country. His name became very,
very famous, and people started traveling to Milford. And because
of this this you know, renown, this publisher or owner
actually of the Los Angeles Times put himself up as
(21:15):
a patient. And I've seen either he put himself up
or one of his editors up as a patient and said,
here's the deal. If this is successful, we will sing
your praises forever in the Los Angeles Times, which will
legitimize you in ways you can't even imagine. If it's
not successful, we're going to ruin you. What do you
want to do? And he did it. He worked on
either Harry Chandler or his editor, and it worked in
(21:38):
whatever way this could possibly work, and the LA Times
started singing the praises of doctor Brinkley, and he went
from kind of famous to a global superstars as far
as like a quack can get. Yeah. And also, Keyhan
put a pin in this. Harry Chandler own Los Angeles'
first radio station, KHJ, And this will all kind of
(22:02):
come back into focus in a minute. But things really
picked up. Brinkley built his own sixteen bed hospital in Milford, Kansas,
a town of either two hundred or two thousand, but
it was the population was rising at least by sixteen
because I get the feeling those beds were always full
of men who wanted these Arkan assassin Arkanson arkans and
(22:26):
goats which he kept out back. And you would walk
you out there. You can say, you can even pick
out your goat. Who I mean, did he was he
killing these goats? I couldn't find any ink um what
happened to I have to surmise that he did because
he would order forty or fifty him at a time,
and once he took their testicles, there were worth nothing
(22:47):
to him. Why would he keep them alive? So yeah,
I think all these goats died. Yeah, that's the worst
part of this whole thing. So pick out your goat,
will put these testicles in you, or at least part
of them. And not only is it good for this,
but sort of like with the medicine shows in the
quackery of snake oil salesman, he's like he rattled off
(23:09):
a list of other things that it would help, right,
like schizophrenia, diabetes, high blood pressure. Apparently he did a
goat ovary procedure to treat a spinal tumor on a woman.
Basically anything that could be wrong with you. He said,
this goat glam procedure is going to help. Yeah. And
then in addition, remember he was an eclectic medical practitioner,
(23:32):
so he was into herbs and tonics and tinctures and
stuff like that, and he sold patent medicines as well,
at a time where you could make a lot of
money selling patent medicine. So he had this thriving surgical
practice that people would travel to Kansas to participate in.
And then he was also selling patent medicines too, So
he was doing pretty well for himself by this time,
(23:54):
this is the mid twenties. Yeah, and spoiler, by the
end of this thing, he was a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy
human being. I saw between nineteen thirty three and thirty
eight he made twelve million dollars and that I did
the old West egg converter. Of course, two hundred and
fifty six million dollars is what that's equal to today.
(24:16):
This guy was made that from a made up procedure
that didn't do anything. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And again
one of the reasons why is because he ended up
becoming kind of a media pioneer. He made his name
in this goat gland operation, but he did a lot
of innovative things. In the early nineteen twenties, he made
(24:36):
a film called Rejuvenation through Gland Transplantation. You think big whop,
it's a it's a movie that touts his practice. But
this was nineteen twenty two that people weren't really using
film for this stuff at the time, So he was
one of the first, I guess it was one of
the first kind of infomercials basically yeah, And so he
(24:56):
bought a radio station, actually created a radio station, KFKB,
Kansas first Kansas Best. It was the first radio station
in Kansas and just the fourth in the United States.
This is nineteen twenty three. And one of the things
he would do would be basically like you just described infomercials,
but on radio about his treatments, his patent medicines. He
(25:17):
also had other stuff too, where he would have like
in No Brother, where art Thou like the Sea Route
was bringing Yes, it was bringing in like this country
acts and recording him and playing him on the radio.
This is the exact same thing. And because it had
a fairly large reach for its size, people started picking
up on this and gibing on it, and he would
(25:38):
get something like three thousand letters a week, and based
on these letters, he would diagnose people on his show
The Medical Question Box. Right. Sorry, I was just thinking
about Stephen Root in that movie out Over the top
of his performance. Yeah, that's pretty good everything, okay, man,
it was really great. Yeah. So he would have his
(25:59):
medical question box segment and put a pin in this
one too, because he would literally diagnose people on the air,
had a network of pharmacists across the country where he
would say, go to you know, if you're in Chicago, whatever,
go to this doctor and get this drug or this
tonic or whatever and start using it. Yep. And he
would get a cut from it because it was his
patent medicine. And then the pharmacists would charge like way
(26:21):
more than you would for other kinds of patent medicines
because it was a Brinkley patent medicine, so you could. Right.
So he's getting all this attention. He's making a big
name for himself. He's got infomercials in via film, a radio,
and he made a little bit too big of a
fuss over himself. Because as he is, his star is rising.
(26:45):
People start getting a little smarter about medicine. The AMA
starts to sort of crack down a little more on quackery,
and things are getting a little more legitimized. Right at
the time, this super illegit him at doctor has his
star rising, and in nineteen twenty three there were investigations
(27:06):
into not just his college but all the kind of
eclectic medical colleges. And he even was like they tried
to arrest him for practicing medicine at one point. Yeah,
when he went to California to treat Harry Chandler, the
owner of the La Times. Afterwards, California tried to get him. So,
like he had the medical establishment, He had this this
(27:28):
guy named Morris Fishbeine, the editor of the Journal of
the American Medical Association, which was still very young at
the time, beating the drum to like, like, go get
that guy. This guy is a quack. He's making tons
of money off these really risky procedures that don't do anything.
And so he had like everybody who had anything to
do with the medical establishment now was after him. Basically, Yeah,
(27:52):
I got the idea from this and other research that Fishbeine.
I don't think he was consumed with Brinkley, but I
think he really had it out for him as this
top quack he was making tons of money. I think
he really wanted to take him down. He really did.
He wrote an editorial in nineteen thirty and he described
(28:13):
Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort, and he
used his radio station to victimize people and to enrich himself. Yeah,
and so they basically, the Kansas Medical Board had no
choice but to go after him because the Journal of
the American Medical Association is saying this guy is a
prominent quack practicing in Kansas. So Kansas had to do something.
(28:36):
So apparently, in nineteen thirty they sent a contingency from
the Kansas Medical Board to watch him perform a couple
of surgeries, and Brinkley went along with it. He performed
two surgeries for them. One of them later remarked that
his surgical techniques were excellent, where his skills were excellent.
And then they went back to Kansas City and the
(28:57):
next day they revoked his medical license after seeing him
perform two surgeries. Yeah, they're like, you were a clearly
skilled surgeon who is out of his mind. Right, And
I watched this nineteen eighty six PBS documentary on him,
and in it they have many interviewed his wife, who
is totally in on this as much as he is,
(29:18):
and she was recounting that story where they went back
to Kansas City. The next day and they revoked his license,
and she was telling the story and kind of like
a homespun country heck kind of way, you know, But
she just thought it was pretty funny. That was that
was my country laugh that I just did. And so
like she was completely in on it. She was not
(29:39):
at all like being duped herself. She was she was
totally in on this whole act. Yeah, so they that
hospital stays open in Milford. Even though his licenses were revoked.
He had colleagues that were still doing the surgeries. He
was getting his cut. Eventually, what's going to happen, of course,
is some of those colleagues going to be like, well,
why am I I know how to do this thing? Now?
Why am I paying this guy part of my money?
(30:00):
I'm gonna go open up my own shop. And that's
what om Owensby did. He went one hundred miles away
in wrote Rosalia, Kansas and said I'm gonna do it
for six hundred bucks. And so Brinkley said, oh, yeah,
I'm going to open up a sanatorium across the street
from your place, and I'm just going to start injecting
people with a secret serum that says does the same
(30:21):
thing as a surgery, and I'm gonna do it for
two hundred bucks. Yes, And so Owensby is a good
example of what he would do. He would alienate his
colleagues because he would do things like bite their ear
off when they tried to keep him from stabbing a patient.
He would he went on huge drinking binges, and they
would keep practicing while ruinously drunk, and would try to
(30:42):
kill people. He pulled a gun on some of his
early patients in Milford to force them to pay a
medical bill. He chased somebody else, another patient out of
the hospital with a knife. So he had a terrible
reputation for violence, especially locally and among some of the
colleagues that he worked with. So it's not really surprised
that anybody went off and like did their own their
(31:03):
own chicanery themselves to kind of compete with him. Yeah,
so what happens, of course, as Brinkley says here, I am.
I'm a successful, wealthy carnival barker and charlatan who is
as good at duping people and who has all these
questionable ideas about modern medicine. And so I'm going to
(31:25):
get into politics and run for governor because I think
people will buy what I'm laying down and we'll take
a break and tell you how that went. Right after
this stuff, you should know, okay, Chuck, So if you're
(32:05):
not practicing quack medicine, you should just get into politics.
It's virtually the same thing, right, sure, So not to
get political or anything, but um so he ran for
governor in nineteen thirty. And remember this guy is famous nationwide,
if not internationally, and he actually he was a write
in candidate, so he if you he was a bad guy,
(32:29):
but he had good politics. He ran on something that
you could call proto New Deal platform, which he called
sympathy for the masses, which was good pay for workers,
pensions for people who like social security, basically free medical
care for the poor and indigent, and like, it was
(32:50):
not a bad platform at all, especially coming from a
really bad guy. So it's almost like he he was
a true believer in his own Paul politics. I think
I don't know that he was necessarily doing it to
fleece the masses, although I'm sure he would have when
he became governor. But he was running at a time
where again people distrusted the people in charge, whether it
(33:13):
was the experts at the AMA or the people who
had been running Kansas and then Washington, and he was
running as this everyman who who was not an expert,
hated experts just as much as the rest of you,
had no experience, but was still a great leader. And
so he got voted for. I think he got something
(33:33):
like one hundred and eighty three thousand votes out of
six hundred thousand. He came in third as a writing candidate. Yeah,
And apparently the writing part was a little hinky in
that the Kansas Attorney General didn't like him and made
it such where if the vote were to count, it
had to be written exactly as follows, capital J period,
(33:56):
capital R period, Brinkley, and if he wrote even I
get the idea even if you just wrote JR. Without
the periods, Yeah, that it wouldn't count. So people look
back and say, he may have even gotten another fifty
thousand votes that didn't count for him. Yet he did
(34:16):
not contest the election results, which is kind of surprising,
and even ran again in nineteen thirty two, again coming
in third place. And that's where it seems like his
political career kind of wound up. Yeah, he said forget
it after that, So he lost his medical license. Remember,
the Kansas Medical Board said you're you're done with this
(34:38):
and because of his use of his radio station is
diagnosing people over the airwaves, just based on letters they
wrote to him. The Federal Radio Commission, the predecessor to
the FCC, said you don't have a radio license any
longer either. KFKB is no longer on the error. So
(34:59):
he did something that it was kind of a trend
around this time in the late twenties early thirties. He
decamped to Mexico, just across the Rio Grand from Texas
and set up what were what was called the border
buster radio station, which was so powerful that it would
overwhelm local radio stations using the same frequency in other
(35:20):
parts of the country. It was that it was like
the loudest shout a radio station could do. And as
a matter of fact, xcr A, which it was the
radio station he founded, was for a time the most
powerful radio station in the entire world. Yeah, it was.
By nineteen thirty eight. It was a five hundred thousand
watch broadcast signal. And if you've got one hundred thousand
(35:44):
WAT radio station like that's I don't know, all the
exact numbers, but that's that's a big market radio station wattage.
These days, right, the biggest most powerful radio station in
the world right now is four hundred and fifty thousand watts,
So that's that's less. Yes, it's a huge outlier. It's
some shy in eight hundreds is a religious station from
(36:05):
bon Air in the Caribbean. Interesting, but I saw Chuck
that UM they could actually boost XCRA to one million
watts from one point. So it was just crazy powerful
and potent. And he was using this to to not
just further his own UM agenda, but he also helped
(36:26):
country music, not just him, but some other like radio
stations around the country that were kind of rogue radio stations.
UM they would put what they called hillbilly music on
and would um would It kind of gave country music
like a foothole in the United States at the time. Yeah,
because radio, you know, like the radio of the East basically,
(36:48):
UM was a little more sophisticated. You know, they're playing
like jazz and like the you know, the the whatever,
you know, town singers and the choirs and things like
that in the symphony. But he started playing country music
and was able to sort of break bands like a
you know, like a regular radio DJ would This quack
(37:10):
doctor who moved to Mexico to broadcast his medical quackery
all of a sudden is like one of the first
I guess DJs for lack of a better word, to
play things like the Carter Family. Right, So he actually
stayed in Texas, right across the border from Acunia, Mexico,
(37:30):
where his radio station was, and he set up shop again.
He's like, well, Kansas said I couldn't practice medicine, but
Texas hasn't said that yet. And you said that he
kind of he dropped the goat gland procedure. He did.
He replaced it with something else he called formula ten
twenty and rather than increased shady at all. No, no,
(37:52):
I looked it up today. Formula ten twenty refers to
a mosquito spray, a pressure washer concentrate for a solution
for circulating cooling water. Yeah, not the kind of stuff
you'd want injected into you. And he sold it for
one hundred bucks for the six shot course that you needed.
And this was not for sexual virility. This was to
(38:12):
treat prostate glance, which I remember that was his first specialty.
He kind of came back full circle and started focusing
on the prostate instead of sexual virility. And that was
the first pillar of his downfall. He moved from sexual
virility to the prostate. Just keep that in mind. Yeah,
And the reason why that was his first downfall was
(38:34):
because his old nemesis, Fishbine gets wind that Brinkley's career
is kicked back in in Texas and said, well, you
know what, the problem that I had with the previous
operation was I couldn't get the enough men to come
forward because they were embarrassed that they got this operation
to begin with. So I didn't have this roster of
(38:56):
people that were like wanted to sue him maybe into
oblivion in But now that he's working on something less embarrassing,
I do have people that'll come forward. Yes. By this time,
I think in nineteen thirty eight, Brinkley had moved from
Texas to Arkansas. Apparently he'd get medicaled up pretty easily
in Arkansas at the time, and fish Mind published an
(39:17):
article in the AMA magazine and what is it Hygia? Yeah,
it's a terrible name. It's a terrible name, where he
again was denouncing Brinkley. Brinkley sued for libel, and that
was a big mistake because at this trial he had to,
like under oath, basically admit that the goat gland surgery
(39:38):
was bunk. That was suing Fishbeine was the second pillar
to his downfall, and like, that was such a bad move.
And I don't know if he felt either indignant and
lost his head about it, I think, or he felt
like he had to defend himself or else he was
basically tacitly agreeing that he was a charlatan or quack.
I don't know, sort of the hubris of their wealthy too.
(39:59):
You know, I could see that because again he's got
a quarter of a billion dollars at the time. I
could see him just thinking that he's unlike anyone else.
So yeah, it probably was hubris. So on the stand
he admitted that, yes, he knew that the goat clanned
operation didn't work. And he lost that case and he
took it to the Court of Appeals and the appellate
(40:20):
court said this quote he was indeed a charlatan and
a quack in the ordinary, well understood meaning of those words,
like you well know what that means. So Therefore, Fishbine
could not have been engaged in libel because the court
found that he actually was a quack, He actually was
a charlatan. So now not only was the editor of
the journal of the American Medical Association saying he was
(40:42):
a quack, an appellate court in I think Texas said
the same thing. So he fell pretty hard, pretty quickly
from that moment on he did. Now, this opened him
up for malpractice suits. I believe three million bucks and
damages back then as about sixty plus million today. He
(41:03):
had his radio station still until the Mexican government came
along and confiscated XCRA again for you know, just radio malpractice,
I guess. And he started to suffer health problems when
he lost our radio station. That was a big emotional
blow to him. He suffered what's called a coronary occlusion,
(41:25):
big time heart trouble. He didn't rest like the real
doctor said he should. He got a blood clot that
went to his leg. That leg was amputated, and then
his family fell into bankruptcy in the nineteen forties, right, Yeah,
from all the lawsuits that he was having to defend
them pay off. Then finally in Little Rock, Arkansas, a
(41:46):
grand jury indicted him from mail fraud along with many
and then six other members of his medical practice, and
he never made it to trial. He died before it
could come to trial. He died on twenty six, nineteen
forty two, So he's never actually convicted of anything as
far as I can tell. He just lost a civil
case and then was definitely about to be convicted of
(42:08):
mail fraud, but he died before he could be Yeah,
what is that fifty seven years old? Yeah? Not that
not that old, Yeah, not that old. And that is
uh yeah, that's John Brinkley story. Yep. Could be a movie,
but I feel like movies like this don't do well.
So they didn't even make him anymore. Noo. He's not
at all sympathetic, and if you made him sympathetic, you
(42:30):
would be using a lot of license. Well, I think
it might have to be told through the lens of fishbine.
Oh I guess so, I guess so sure? The dogged
Pursuer of Truth Yeah, played by Sam Rockwell. Yeah, although
Brockwell seems like he could have been Brinkley. Oh he
could do either one. Why don't you just make him both?
Pay him one pay one salary to hard. Yes. Okay, Well,
(42:56):
since we came up with the great um structure to
a movie on this, I say it's time for a
listener man. All right, hey guys, a longtime listener. I
recently moved to Nashville for work, so I was excited
when the Grand ol Opry episode came out. This is
an old one. Attended my first show at the Rieman
just a few weeks ago and really enjoyed the episode.
But I got a promotional email from the Riemen with
(43:17):
a feature called celebrating the Women of the Rieman's History,
and I want to tell you about Lula sed Naff,
who was responsible for bringing the Grand ol Opry to
the Rheman Theater. She was definitely making her own way
in a man's world, often going by lc Naff, and
her gargantuan contributions to the music scene in Nashville seemed
to be all but forgotten. She was working as a
(43:38):
bookkeeper for an agency that booked performances at the Riemen.
When the agency dissolved. The widow Lula needed a way
to continue to provide for a daughter an aging mother,
so she convinced the Rieman's board to let her rent
the space and put on the events. Lula recalled herself
an unreconstructed rebel and was known for being difficult, but
the Rieman's Museum curator says she got the building out
(44:00):
of debt, brought a powerful variety to the building state,
and defended the public's right to see whatever entertainment they desired.
When she challenged the Board of sensors attempt to block
a performance, it seemed like a real rock star and
that is great additional information from Katie. Thanks a lot,
Katie appreciate that. We definitely I don't recall her name
(44:23):
at all, do you. I don't think so, But Lula
sounds like she might deserve her own episode or a
movie starring Sam Rockwell that's right. Well, if you want
to get in touch with this, like Katie, right, yep,
did you can email us? Thanks by the way, Katie
at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff You Should
(44:49):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listening to your favorite shows
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