The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley

At various times there arises some extraordinary popular sorcerer to exploit the people in one or all of such potentially profitable fields as religion, politics and, of course, medicine. Such a man was John R. Brinkley, of Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas, medical maverick and potent radio personality, a physician and surgeon with sketchy training, lone-wolf ethics, a sense of glittering destiny and a free-wheeling spirit of adventure, who missed winning the governorship of Kansas twice by a micron’s breadth.

Doctor Brinkley revived the old dream of eternal youth on a spacious scale, and devised a goat-gonad operation which, he promised, would make any oldster once again a marvel of sexual potency. Six thousand goats gave up their virility for his patients, netting the doctor twelve million dollars. He owned the most powerful radio station in North America, and had his own busy hospital. He was a guest at the White House, a thirty-second-degree mason, and the owner of a vast fleet of Cadillacs, three yachts, and a palatial Texas estate. But, of course, all his life, the law was just around the corner. In the end, the AMA, the U.S. Post Office, the State Department, and the FCC proved too much for him. He died, the finest flower of U.S. medical quackery, in 1942.