John R. Brinkley and Goat-Gland Science

 

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John R. Brinkley 1885-1942

By Robert Tucker

John Richard Brinkley's life story is a unbelievable mixture of brazen medical quackery, radio broadcasting, a rigged gubernatorial election, and thousands of pairs of goat testicles. The man known as "The Milford Messiah" is little remembered today, in spite of the countless headlines, lawsuits and jokes he spawned in his own time. But as the world's foremost practitioner of "Goat-Gland Science," Brinkley left the world a rich legacy upon his death in 1942: increased governmental regulation of telecommunications and medicine.

The details of Brinkley's early years are not known with much certainty because he later paid $5000 to a writer for a flattering account of his life. Clement Wood's The Life of a Man includes all the melodramatic touches of a vanity biography, such as a log-cabin birth and a touching death-bed scene with Brinkley and his mother. Most of the book is fiction, however, and much of it contradicts earlier statements Brinkley himself made about his upbringing. Brinkley was born, most likely, in North Carolina, circa 1885, into a poor family. From these humble beginnings, he eventually became a graduate of the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, an institution even more dubious than its name implies.

Brinkley set up a practice in Milford, Kansas, and continued for some years as nothing more than a small town doctor. He would have continued as such, perhaps, had not an elderly Geary County farmer entered his office one day. The blushing farmer complained of a nonexistent libido brought on by his increasing years and asked Brinkley if anything could be done. Dimly recalling something he once read describing legitimate scientific work in endocrinology, Brinkley declared he had a certain cure, a combination of the respectable work of scientists and folksy notions of his own. Brinkley's "Goat-Gland Science" would make him millions in the ensuing years.

Brinkley theorized that by transplanting the sexual glands of the ever lustful goat into the male scrotum, he would renew manly vigor and restore a healthy sex drive. "So far as I know," he once explained, "I was the first man that ever did this operation of taking the goat testicle and putting it in the man's testicle. The glands of a three weeks old male goat are laid upon the non-functioning glands of a man, within twenty minutes of the time they are removed from the goat. In some cases I open the human gland and lay the tissue of the goat within the human gland. ... I find that after being properly connected these goat glands do actually feed, grow into, and become absorbed by the human glands, and the man is renewed in his physical and mental vigor."

A year after that first transplant, the farmer's wife gave birth to a baby boy named "Billy." For a mere $750, Brinkley promised the same result for anyone else willing to undergo his surgery, and found more than a few eager subjects. In spite of his limited abilities as a surgeon, the first few goat-to-human testicle transplants went surprisingly well, with one minor exception. Through lucky happenstance, the first transplanted testicles were from the odorless breed of Toggenberg goats. Two later recipients, however, were fitted with gonads from the Angora breed, and according to Brinkley they reeked like a steamy barn in midsummer. Afterwards, the embarrassed Brinkley always assured his patients he used only the Toggenberg breed, going so far as to let his patients pick a goat from a pen outside his office.

Brinkley and wife

Brinkley began to devote all his energies to publicizing the "novel surgery" performed at what he christened "The Brinkley Clinic." Brinkley's claims came to the attention of Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler began to publicize "the delicate grafting" in his paper. While the publicity made Brinkley a well-known figure, it also brought him to the attention of the California medical boards, who revoked his temporary license to practice and began criminal proceedings against him. He fled the state, returning to Kansas, where he found his surgery in ever increasing demand.

The Brinkley Clinic

Brinkley had for some time been broadcasting music via radio throughout his hospital to calm his understandably nervous patients. In 1923, he hit upon the idea of advertising by radio, blanketing the Midwest with his message. Brinkley's original station, KFKB, was a queer mixture of quackery, lectures from professors at a nearby college, and rustic entertainment programs. In between an array of banjo players, yodelers, and French language instruction, Brinkley gave frequent talks late at night, often asking his aging male listeners in his mesmerizing voice, "Do you wish to continue as a sexual flat tire?" "Note the difference," he advised, "between the stallion and the gelding. The stallion stands erect, neck arched, mane flowing, champing at the bit, stamping the ground, seeking the female, while the gelding stands around half asleep, going into action only when goaded, cowardly, listless, with no interest in anything."

Brinkley's radio lectures only furthered his considerable fame, and hundreds of men across the nation flocked to Kansas. At one point, the Milford post office had to be expanded to accommodate the tremendous amount of mail Brinkley was receiving. Forty goats a week were being shipped to his hospital by rail.

Needless to say, Brinkley was not escaping the attention of various governmental authorities during this time, but none of them ever succeed in stopping him, seldom even managing to slow him down. The medical establishment in Kansas was too weak to revoke Brinkley's license for many years, and the governor of Kansas refused to extradite him to California to stand trial, in no small part because he was a frequent guest on KFKB. When federal communications authorities examined his station's practices, Brinkley defended himself by pointing out his station was devoted many of its hours to educational programming.

In fact, Brinkley's appearances in court were usually the result of his own filing of litigation. In 1928, the Journal of the American Medical Association included a scathing condemnation of Brinkley, noting many of his contradictory biographical statements, the dubious nature of his medical credentials, and the lack of scientific evidence to support his claims. Brinkley promptly sued for libel, asking $600,000 in compensation for his damaged reputation. Brinkley and Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the JAMA, would be tangled up in this case for many years.

Brinkley newspaper ad

A man such as Brinkley, once publicly labeled a con artist, fraud, and quack, generally has at least one new career opportunity opened to him: politics. Under investigation by federal communication officials, Postal Inspectors, and the Kansas Medical Board (which had finally managed to revoke his license), Brinkley announced in 1930 that he would run for governor of Kansas. He had waited too long, however, to be officially placed on the ballot, so he was forced to campaign as a write-in candidate.

Brinkley, ever the populist, vowed in time honored tradition to "Return Kansas to the people!" It must be admitted, however, that his promise to let a herd of goats graze on the lawn of the governors mansion was certainly "progressive." He traveled the Kansas countryside in his personal airplane, landing in open fields where the populace greeted him by the thousands, hoping to see the man the other candidates and the newspapers lampooned. Brinkley, ever aware of his audience, quoted Scripture endlessly, and reminded them that "Only you and God will be in that voting booth."

Brinkley the candidate

Neither the Republicans nor Democrats took his bid seriously at first, an almost fatal miscalculation. Brinkley's folksy manner and anti-authoritarian views delighted the citizens of Kansas, and he was actually one of the most popular men in the state at that time. By the time the election rolled around, the major party candidates were panicked, for Brinkley had a legitimate shot at winning. They saved themselves by inventing a technicality.

A Kansas law stipulated that a write-in candidate's name must be written on the ballot by voters exactly as it appeared on the official entry papers. When the counting was completed, Brinkley had 183,278 votes, around 35,000 less than the Republican and Democratic candidates, who were separated by only 250 votes. The Chicago Daily News estimated that between 10,000 and 50,000 votes clearly intended for Brinkley were disallowed by election officials belonging to the major parties due to various minor discrepancies in spelling, such as the omission of Brinkley's middle initial.

Most historians of Kansas politics now admit that, had the election hinged not on technicalities but on the will of the people, Brinkley may well have won the election; some scholars go so far as to admit that he probably did. He ran in the next election, and although he came in third, he still amassed more than 200,000 votes. A third attempt was less successful, but Brinkley remained a political influence in the state.

Amazingly, Brinkley continued his business relatively unmolested during the early '30s. During this time, he invented a scheme even more financially rewarding than his goat-gland operation (which Brinkley had by then replaced with a mysterious "compound operation" he claimed to have perfected). He started a program on his radio station called "Doctor Brinkley's Medical Question Box." Listeners wrote him describing their various ailments, and he would over the air prescribe his own product line of medicines, which sometimes were nothing more than colored water. Of course, almost everyone suffered the vague symptoms he described. Unfortunately for Brinkley, the program also was blatantly unethical and endangered the lives of the "patients" who relied on his advice. Federal authorities finally had the appropriate justification, and revoked his broadcasting license for not operating in the public interest.

But Brinkley was not so easily foiled. He simply moved his operation to Del Rio, Texas, and set up a transmitter across the Mexican border. His new station, XER, broadcasting at a mind-boggling half-million watts, could be heard clearly throughout North America, and continued to bring him enough patients to maintain a sizable income.

By the late 1930's, however, Brinkley's streak of invincibility was coming to an end. The courts ruled against Brinkley in his long-standing lawsuit with Fishbein, legally labeling him a fraud. Pressured by the US government, Mexican officials closed down Brinkley's transmitter. His fortune had also dwindled, and eventually he was forced to declare bankruptcy. In 1941, Brinkley had a series of heart attacks, and his leg required amputation. During his recuperation, Postal Inspectors finally charged Brinkley and his wife, along with several associates, with mail fraud. But in his final triumph over his critics, Brinkley evaded a trial by dying on May 26, 1942 in San Antonio, Texas.

John R. Brinkley is certainly one of the most curious figures in American history. His legacy is a bewildering one. Over 16,000 men bore the scars of his operations, and thousands had relied on his brand of colored water masquerading as medicine. He made pioneering use of radio broadcasting, and his campaigns turned Kansas politics into a circus. His incredible career prompted increased scrutiny of medicine and telecommunications by the federal government.

Brinkley, a man who made his living off of the vain desires and gullibility of the populace, seems an unlikely object of admiration. Yet one almost cannot help but to admire him for his wily nature, gift of self-promotion and sheer force of personality. Unarguably, Brinkley possessed a form of genius, though one which the world perhaps would have been better off without.

But however we judge Brinkley's legacy, he undoubtedly left behind a herd of very relieved goats.

© 1995, Robert Tucker

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