John Brinkley and the Goat Gland Fraud
Medical Huckster Got Rich Through a Series of Elaborate Scams
Born in 1885 into a poverty-stricken North Carolina family, John R. Brinkley was nonetheless able to use his wiles, audacity, and alarming lack of scruples to become fantastically rich. He largely achieved this by selling useless patent medicines, at first through his clinics and later through constant hawking on his pioneering radio station. The greatest bulk of his wealth, though, derived from a simple operation he performed on both men and women, claiming the procedure would boost sex drive and fertility.
Brinkley’s Early Scams
John Brinkley had wanted to be a doctor from a young age, but for a while at least his hopes would be stymied. Leaving school at sixteen, he took a job as a mail carrier, then moved to New York to work as a telegrapher for Western Union. In 1906 he returned to North Carolina, where he married Sally Wike. The pair of them posed as Quaker doctors and sold patent remedies at their traveling medicine show. They then moved to Knoxville, where Brinkley assisted in a similar scam with a man known as Dr. Burke.
A year later, Brinkley and his wife had moved to Chicago, where he enrolled in medical school, albeit an unaccredited one called Bennett Medical College. Brinkley attended classes and worked as a telegrapher, but the tuition fees and the costs of raising a family were sending him into debt. He completed three years of study, but there was tremendous upheaval in his personal life; his wife left him several times, and though the pair reconciled and moved back to North Carolina, leaving his tuition unpaid, she and their two children finally left him for good after he had bought a medical certificate from a diploma mill in St. Louis. He then ended up in Greenville, South Carolina.
Fertility Treatments
In Greenville, Brinkley and another man set up shop, billing themselves as “Electro Medic Doctors” and injecting men with a $25 “fertility drug” that was actually colored water. The scam lasted two months, after which the two men fled town, leaving a trail of unpaid bills. Brinkley next turned up in Memphis, where he married Minnie Jones, even though he was still legally married to his first wife; then he made his way to Knoxville, where he was almost immediately apprehended and extradited back to Greenville on charges of writing bad checks and practicing medicine without a license. He and his partner Crawford were jailed, but settled out of court; Brinkley then moved on to Arkansas. After taking over another medical clinic there, Brinkley was able to earn enough money to finally pay off his debt to Bennett Medical College, and in 1914 he and his new wife moved to Kansas City where he finished his unaccredited medical degree at Eclectic Medical University; the diploma allowed him to legally practice medicine in eight states.
Goat Glands for Virility
An Army Reservist, Brinkley served briefly in World War I, but after being discharged due to illness he moved to Milford, Kansas, where he set up the clinic that would finally make him a wealthy and famous man. The clinic had 16 rooms, and though at first he made a respectable living treating victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, he soon turned to a more lucrative enterprise: Restoring virility.
Brinkley, noticing the randy exploits of the average billy goat, reasoned that by implanting goat testicles into the scrotal sac of a human male, some of the goat’s prodigious sexual appetite might be transferred to the man. He performed the procedure on dozens of men (and some women too, transplanting the testicles into their abdomens near their ovaries) at $750 a pop ($8,000 in today’s dollars). Every now and then the operation seemed to work, but more often than not, the patients saw no change or became ill, and an undetermined number died shortly after leaving the clinic; Brinkley was sued many times in the eleven years following 1930. Undaunted, Brinkley began prescribing his goat gland treatment for all sorts of different ailments, soliciting new customers through a massive advertising campaign. He even turned up uninvited at a transplant seminar in Chicago and demonstrated his procedure on 34 men, and later transplanted goat glands into a few film stars on a trip to Los Angeles. His public profile was growing, but all the attention and adulation bestowed on him by his loyal patients attracted the attention of the AMA, who began looking into his past and trying to discredit him.
Source:
Brock, Pope (2008). Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam. Crown. ISBN: 0307339882.
Goat Testicles Were Transplanted Into Humans
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