Charlatan

John Brinkley, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina but attended Rush Medical College in Chicago, got his start touring as a medicine man hawking miracle tonics and became famous for transplanting goat testicles into impotent men. Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923, hustling his pseudoscience over the airwaves and giving an outlet to astrologers and country music. His nemesis was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the buoyant, compulsively curious editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association whose luminary friends included Sinclair Lewis, Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken. Fishbein took aim at Brinkley in JAMA, lay publications and pamphlets distributed by the thousands. Even after the Kansas State Medical Board yanked his medical license in 1930, Brinkley ran twice for governor of Kansas and almost won. Finally, Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel and lost in a spectacular showdown. Brock (Indiana Gothic) did tremendous research on this rollicking story, but the result is at times unfocused, overwritten and digressive, borrowing just a little too much from the overblown rhetoric of its subject. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 5)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

One day in the fall of 1917, a Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, 46 years of age, showed up at the clinic that had recently been opened in the hamlet of Milford by a medical quack named John R. Brinkley. "His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation," Pope Brock writes in this hugely amusing if somewhat sobering book, "any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel." Stittsworth reluctantly admitted that he was suffering the condition for which Viagra is now prescribed. As Brinkley tried to dream up a solution, the farmer looked wistfully out the window, "pondering the livestock," and said: "Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts."

Precisely what happened thereafter "is in dispute," but two nights later Stittsworth returned to the clinic, "climbed onto the operating table," and awaited Brinkley. "Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic," and Brinkley was on his way. Two weeks later Stittsworth "reappeared with a smile on his face." As he told other farmers about his good fortune, men -- and then women -- began to queue up for injections of billy goat magic, with the result that Brinkley soon "became a pioneer in gland transplants" at exactly the moment when America was ready for them.

Brock says, accurately, that "there has probably never been a more quack-prone and quack-infested country than the United States," and the period between the two world wars -- the years when Texas Guinan welcomed customers to her New York speakeasy with the gleeful cry, "Hello, suckers!" -- turned out to be a high-water mark of quackery, as the widespread longing for health and eternal youth coincided with the age of science: "Mankind had found wisdom at last. Science! Technology! These were the new church. Adam was out, apes were in. Rationality ruled. Rationality had made the airplane possible, and instant coffee. Few realized that it also made possible the golden age of quacks." Brock continues:

"In this dizzy world of wonders anything was possible, and it all conspired to make the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad. One measure of the scientific gullibility of the age is the number of mythical animals that were now positively declared to exist. During this period between the world wars, sightings were reported and searches launched for, among others, the snoligostus, the ogopogo, the Australian bunyip, the whirling wimpus, the rubberado, the rackabore, and the cross-feathered snee. . . . Advances in medicine and hygiene had already increased the average lifetime from forty-one years in 1870 to more than fifty-five by the early 1920s. Now the sky was the limit -- biblical life spans, some researchers said, could become a reality -- all thanks to the homely gonad and the brave new science of endocrinology."

John R. Brinkley was just the man to seize the day. A farm boy from the North Carolina mountains, he had found his way into quackery by the time he reached his 20s, and though a brief flirtation with "electric medicine from Germany" -- "injecting colored water into rear ends" -- got him into jail in South Carolina in 1913, he just headed west and bounced right back. He had an "uncanny grasp of psychology, both mass and individual," and he "understood that the relationship between a man and a woman is often less fraught than that between man and member." He was a strange guy, "a sort of down-home egghead, crisply confident and alert to a thousand details," who occasionally "got liquored up" and turned briefly violent, but he could turn on the blarney and the charm as fast as you please.

The people of Milford thought he was the Second Coming. The astonishing success of his clinic, which by 1918 was a 16-room operation called the Brinkley Institute of Health, brought a great wave of prosperity to this dreary little crossroads. He was way ahead of his time, using advertising and radio and anything else he could exploit to spread the word about the magic he could perform. In 1929 he dreamed up something called Medical Question Box, in which listeners to his radio station could send in their health grievances: "Brinkley would read some of the letters, diagnose each case, and suggest treatment -- all on the radio." He told them what drugs to buy from pharmacists who were in on the scam: "The pharmacists kicked back one dollar to Brinkley on each jar sold (at about six times normal retail) and kept the rest."

Of course he had enemies, the most influential and determined of whom was Morris Fishbein. He was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which at the time was far short of the prestige it enjoys today, but it gave him a platform sufficiently visible for him to become "the great quack buster of his day, and later the hellhound on Brinkley's trail." The first time word reached him about Brinkley's antics, Fishbein turned his attention to "the greatest cause of his career: the professional extermination of John Brinkley, M.D.," but it took him a long time to bring that off, and Brinkley didn't go down without one hell of a fight.

Brinkley was like a Shmoo, the round-bottomed inflatable toy of my youth. Bop it this way or that, it always rolled right back with a big smile on its silly face. You couldn't keep John Brinkley down, at least not for long. In 1922 when he went to Los Angeles, "the most quack-intensive town in the nation," he found a "vast sucker pool" and aimed to cash in on it by building a 36-room hospital at immense expense, but then the California medical board "found his résumé riddled with lies and discrepancies" and denied him a license. Never mind. He simply went back to Milford, telling his wife, "The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce," and expanded his operation there. An advertisement said, "It is modern throughout, private rooms with bath, and the latest and most modern equipment, telephone in every room, private rooms, reading rooms, lounging rooms, large spacious lobby and dining room, modern drug store and barber shop."

His radio station in Milford, KFKB, was determined by Radio Digest in 1930 to be "the most popular radio station in the United States." That same year he lost his medical license, so he decided to run for governor of Kansas as a write-in independent. He almost certainly would have won had not the rules been switched at the last minute, eliminating as many as 50,000 of his votes on specious grounds. Never mind. He bounced right back and went to Mexico, where he set up a radio operation that by 1932 was up to an astonishing 1 million watts, making it "far and away the most powerful on the planet," so powerful that "on clear nights Brinkley reached Alaska, skipped across to Finland, was picked up by ships on the Java Sea. In later years Russian spies reportedly used the station to help them learn English."

The programming on Brinkley's Mexican station wasn't just pitches for health schemes and the extreme right-wing views to which he had become susceptible. In order to attract and keep listeners, he brought in country and Tex-Mex musicians; among those tuning in were the young Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and others who eventually became famous and influential country musicians themselves. Stations that broadcast into the United States from Mexico were known as "border busters," and Brinkley's XERA was the biggest of all, inadvertently leading the way to the "full-scale cultural upheaval" that country music brought about.

That was a nice side product, but it couldn't distract attention from the mounting numbers of Brinkley's patients who died in or after leaving his clinic. In 1930 the Kansas City Star "published the names of five people who had expired at Brinkley's hospital since the fall of 1928" -- "His signature was on their death certificates" -- and his license was revoked that same year after it was shown that 42 people, "some of whom weren't ill when they arrived, had died either by his own hand or under his supervision." His final numbers are unknown, but they are high; "though perhaps not the worst serial killer in American history, ranked by body count he is at least a finalist for the crown."

This, needless to say, is where Pope Brock's tale turns dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance. These are aspects of human nature that just don't go away; even today, in the age of supposed medical enlightenment and sophistication, "rejuvenation is a global bazaar of infomercials and Web addresses, tools and toys for every need." John R. Brinkley may be long dead (since 1942), but his heirs in quackery continue to flourish.

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