The Bandit chief in The Magnificent Seven justifies his predations against the poor villagers by the rather Darwinian explanation that “if God did not want them shorn, He would not have made them sheep.” But most of the time, the sheep don’t need to be fleeced by force or threats; they run right up to the Fleecer and practically thrust their money into his pockets. So it was with the fabulous John R. Brinkley. An American, a child of the Middle West (Kansas), a graduate of one of the many dubious “medical schools” existing at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and definitely a man with eye for the main chance. That was the Great Day of the Patent Medicine and Snake Oil salesmen, a tribe who roved the American continent vending their potations and preparations to a credulous populace. To be fair, there wasn’t really much scientific medicine to be had past the Eastern seabord, and even if there were some around, it wasn’t able to do much for a lot of people. Dr. B. did some market research and found that a lot of men back then, as now, had worries about losing sexual vigor. He proposed to help them by means of the surgical implantation of goat testes into their own genitals, at the rate of $750 for the operation. That was a lot of money in the WWI era, so Brinkley was not exactly going cheap. But even so, the money started to roll in, and the operating suite was a busy place indeed.
How all this got started, was kept going, and was finally derailed, largely through the effort of Morris Fishbein, MD, dedicated quackbuster and paladin of the nascent American Medical Association, is detailed in a new book:
Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him and the Age of Flimflamby Pope Brock. Crown Publishers: 2008. 304 pp. $24.95
Brinkley was in many ways the prototypical American “booster”, so prominent in the Roaring Twenties, and skewered so mercilessly in the novels of Sinclair Lewis. But he was no dope either, and he had the huckster’s intuitive grasp of what people want. He was one of the major forces in the development of radio. He built a mega station south of the border, from which he beamed promotional messages mixed up with music, news and other announcements, since he realized that continuous promotion of goat gland surgery was not likely to keep many listeners. At a time when nobody was really sure what to do with radio, Brinkley’s Mexican Million Watt sender got people thinking. Finally, Fishbein exposed him, and the Mexican government got so nervous about some of the pro-Nazi content coming from the
station that they shut it down. He died a relatively young man, of heart trouble. Fishbein went on to become the unoffical spokesman of organized American medicine. Dr.B was an amazing figure. As the guy said, Only in America!
