A Scammer Who Didn’t Need Artificial Intelligence…Just Goat Testicles
Dr. John R. Brinkley, Border Conman Extraordinaire
It’s hard to conceive of a better subject for a movie than Dr. John R. Brinkley, a Depression-era grifter with phony medical degrees who made a fortune in the pre-Viagra era transplanting goat glands into men desperate to perk up their love lives.
After most of his potential customers got wise to his goat testicle scam (some died from infections before they could get wise), Brinkley zeroed in on another common male problem—prostate enlargement. “The old cocklebur,” he called it.
The good “doctor” hawked a surgical procedure amounting to a vasectomy that he touted as a cure not only for prostate troubles, but virtually anything else a man could complain about.
From a Hollywood perspective, Brinkley’s story has all the ingredients for a fine period piece. It’s a tale of rags-to-riches, sexual exploitation, lavish spending, world travels, controversy, drama, action and just plain evil.
Should anyone on the left coast ever decide to bring this whacky but tragic story to the big or small screen, script writers and producers will have four books on Brinkley to work with.
Gerald Carson wrote the first book on Brinkley, The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley. Published in 1960, it’s long out of print.
The second title is R. Alton Lee’s The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley, published in 2002. Next, coming in 2009, was Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him and the Age of Flimflam by Poe Brock.
The most recent book on the goat gland guy is Making Them Believe: How One of America’s Legendary Rogues Marketed ‘The Goat Testicles Solution’ and Made Millions by Dan S. Kennedy.
While Lee’s book is from an academic publisher and reads like the work of a scholar, Brock’s biography is much livelier. He makes it almost novel-like by dramatizing the professional conflict between two men, Brinkley and Dr. Morris Fishbein, a physician with real degrees who as editor of the American Medical Association’s magazine eventually succeeded in bringing down the quack.
As the subtitle suggests, the book is also an easy-to-read history of medical scams, from con artists who extolled the virtues of “electric medicine” to purveyors of medicine containing more alcohol than anything else.
Born in North Carolina in 1885, Brinkley conned his way through the south to Milford, Kansas, where he finally hit the big time with his goat gland procedure. He raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars and then millions, also pioneering the use of radio to hawk his procedures and products.
Kansas medical authorities finally succeeded in jerking his physician’s license, and the federal government finally acted to get him off the airwaves. Hoping to regain his revoked medical license by getting elected governor (and thus being able to rig the state medical board in his favor) he sought the office in Kansas three times, in 1930, 1932 and 1934.
After his last defeat at the polls, like many a scalawag before and since, Brinkley decided to come to Texas.
Del Rio welcomed him with open arms. He set up his hospital in the Roswell Hotel, built a super powerful radio station across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Acuna and purchased and remodeled a large house on 16 acres in the southern part of town. He oversaw its conversion into a mansion with everything from a built-in pipe organ to a large swimming pool.
Brinkley’s mansion on the border. That’s an image of his yatch in the upper left corner.
Though Brinkley is usually portrayed as an eccentric con artist, Brock gets to the truth in his book: The doctor was more than a medical quack. He was a killer-by-con, no less heartless than some Nazi doing medical experiments for the Third Reich.
Why?
Not only did a set of goat testicles fail to revive a man’s vigor, Brinkley’s “therapeutical” implants killed dozens, probably scores and maybe hundreds of men through infection or other complications. The death toll continued with the prostate procedures the “doctor” hyped.
The hapless fellow under the bright surgical lights figured he’d wake up a new man.
And who knows how many Billy goat gruffs transitioned to mild-mannered wethers courtesy of Dr. B?
Beyond this very dark side of his career, Brinkley was a misbegotten genius who plowed new ground in public relations, marketing and entertainment.
He was the first political candidate to use an airplane in his campaigning. To reach even more potential voters, he also pioneered the use of sound trucks to broadcast his message. On the mass media side, his radio stations popularized country western music and the disk jockey format that saw its heyday in the 1960s with the Top 40 radio stations.
Alas, a libel suit Brinkley filed in federal court in 1938 against his AMA nemesis Dr. Fishbein backfired when a jury found that the plaintiff was a “charlatan and quack.” His fortune blown, Brinkley died of heart disease in San Antonio four years later.
The phony doctor was buried in Memphis’ Forest Hill Cemetery. A large bronze “Winged Victory” figure topped the marble column above his Tennessee grave until 2017, when someone stole it.
The Brinkley mansion still stands at 512 Qualia in Del Rio. A historical marker was placed there in 2003. The old Roswell Hotel, built in the 1920s, also has made it through the first quarter of the 21st century, though today it’s an apartment building.
What also endures is the willingness of some—now often abetted by AI—to scam the gullible among us.