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