Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (46 page)

“Just in your wallet,” said Brinkley, who kept his straight face for a few moments, before flashing his wide amiable grin and chuckling. The patient caught on and offered his own nervous chuckle.

“Seriously, though,” said Brinkley. The doctor canted his head, his face assumed a thoughtful, considered look. Finally he said, “It is true that any surgical procedure is invasive. However, my methods are, and I don't mind saying, far beyond what are considered commonplace at present in this country.” A slight smile played across his mouth. “In short, no, Mr. Mulravey. You won't feel a thing.”

“And will I . . .? Will I be able to . . .?” the man reddened, looked down at the old hands curled in his lap like two tired birds. “Will I be able to, um . . .?”

Again, a knowing smile, not condescending but kindly, as Brinkley nodded and said in a quiet voice, “Yes, all will work . . . as it once did.”

The old man's moist eyes brightened and his mouth stretched into a wide grin. He seemed to sit straighter in the wooden chair, even though he was clad only in his undergarments. “Well, that's fine. That's just fine. I suspected as much. It will be a pleasure to be, ah, back in action, as they say.”

A short while later, with the old man safely toddling his way down the sidewalk out front, Brinkley's smile drooped from his face as he turned to his secretary. “I assume the check he just gave you is made out correctly?” He didn't wait for her to answer, but bent over the desk, straining to see the writing on the check's front.

“Yes, doctor.”

“Good. I believe that makes six as of today, up from two last week.” He smiled. “I do believe I'm onto something. You wait and see if I'm not right.” He tapped the counter with his finger.

“Yes, doctor.” The secretary nodded.

“Now, you take today's payments on over to the bank. That's why we're here, after all, isn't it?” He winked and turned to the empty waiting room, picturing it filled with wealthy, needy men, a line trailing out the door. “Soon, Doctor Brinkley,” he murmured to himself as he headed back to his office. “Soon.” And he smiled all the way.

It wasn't long before Brinkley began implanting the same glands into women's abdomens. And though his surgical abilities were feeble, his science unfounded, and his very right to practice medicine a mere house of cards, people flocked to him for the procedure. By this time he had begun to claim the operation was a miracle cure for no fewer than twenty-seven afflictions ranging from excessive flatulence to dementia. In a bit of perfect timing—and incredible coincidence—Brinkley was able to announce that his very first implant patient had recently become a father following the dicey procedure.

Newspapers from all over the country descended on the quack's offices and made him a national sensation. A born huckster, Brinkley knew a good thing when he saw it, and he made the most of all this free publicity. He worked up slogans, posed for the camera, and claimed his operations were able to transform the weak and timid into “the ram that am with every lamb.”

All this attention drew not only the wealthy-but-desperate class so keen to make his acquaintance, but also the interest of the American Medical Association. The powerful organization soon sent an undercover investigator to Kansas.

There were other doctors at the time who were experimenting with similar procedures and theories, but none had gained the rising-star status of Brinkley. The press loved him, though as time wore on, his shine began to tarnish as a growing number of patients died from complications arising from the procedures. Brinkley was also accused repeatedly of performing operations while inebriated and of working in less-than-sanitary conditions.

Lawsuits reared their heads, but so well-loved was the charismatic—and wealthy—Brinkley that he swatted his detractors down like flies. He was invited to demonstrate his techniques at a Chicago hospital operating theater. During the proceedings he implanted goat testicles into a number of high-profile folks, men and women, eager for relief from whatever afflictions they claimed troubled them. A whopping thirty-four people in all received his ministrations that day, including a judge and the chancellor of a university law school.

He returned to Milford a bigger celebrity than ever, and his specialty operations increased in both price and frequency. Just when it seemed his star could rise no higher, his most high-profile procedure came about. The owner of the prestigious
Los Angeles Times
offered a challenge: If Brinkley could successfully transplant goat glands into one of the paper's editors, he would be rewarded with the best sort of positive press no amount of money could buy.

If the procedure was deemed a failure, however, the famous publisher, Harry Chandler, claimed he would ruin Brinkley in the press. Brinkley took the challenge, and by all accounts the operation was a thumbs-up success. Enough so that he picked up a roster of high-profile patients, a number of Hollywood stars among them.

That pesky investigator for the AMA, Morris Fishbein, himself a (legitimate) doctor, had seen through Brinkley's charade all along and recognized him for what he was—a charlatan and huckster of the highest order. Fishbein did his best to draw attention to Brinkley's blatant chicanery. Brinkley, he claimed, was not merely duping the gullible out of their money with a simple sleight-of-hand card game, he was playing with their very lives—and with increasing frequency the patients were the ones losing. Worst of all, it was obvious to Fishbein that Brinkley didn't care. Operating under the auspices of the AMA, Fishbein dogged Brinkley relentlessly, using every opportunity to expose chinks in the quack's armor.

Brinkley grew increasingly confident as his fame spread and more patients signed up for procedures with each month that passed. But as his popularity increased, so too did his incidence of casualties. And yet it didn't seem to matter to the public that the man they adored was also maiming and killing the very people he was supposedly helping.

Ever the opportunist, Brinkley was not satisfied with his current level of success. He reasoned that reaching an even wider audience would bring in more patients, and more patients equaled more money. And it was while in Los Angeles that Brinkley figured out how to do so. He became obsessed with the idea of advertising to masses of people using the broad reach of the relatively new technology of radio.

A marketer to his marrow, Brinkley eschewed the accepted notion of radio being merely a vehicle for entertainment and fluff. Rather he viewed all those tempting airwaves as a way to reach untold numbers of new patients. As a venue for hosting and promoting his various remedies, cures, and quackeries, Brinkley knew he had discovered a treasure chest of promise. Never mind that America's fledgling airwaves were at the time rarely used as an advertising medium, Brinkley started the station KFKB (“Kansas First, Kansas Best”), and never had a platform more suited a man, nor come at a better time in his career.

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association continued to cast its net wide, pulling in practitioners of medical chicanery such as snake-oil salesmen and diploma mills. Not surprisingly, one of them happened to be the very place Brinkley had obtained his diploma years before. The grand jury in San Francisco handed down indictments to various individuals, Brinkley among them. But since he was in Kansas and they were in California, the grand jury required legal authority by way of the governor of Kansas before Brinkley could be extradited to the Golden State to stand trial.

But the governor of Kansas nixed the idea of extradition because Brinkley was far too precious an earner, crucial to the state's economic well-being. Having dodged that bullet, most folks in Brinkley's position would exercise humility.

But John Romulus Brinkley was no ordinary fellow. The first thing he did on learning extradition from Kansas wasn't in the offing was fill his radio station's airspace with blustering, bravado-filled speeches about his own importance, about how he had personally defeated the American Medical Association, and how Morris Fishbein was no threat.

Brinkley took to radio like a duck to water, and found it was so much easier than standing before a crowd of skeptical hayseeds not eager to part with their hard-earned coins. Now, day after day he spent pleasurable hours perched before the microphone telling huge numbers of listeners, men and women, why they needed his treatments, appealing to the insecure and desperate. He assured them he was there with a simple cure—goat glands.

As his wealth grew, so grew his needs for a more stable infrastructure to handle the increased demands on his business. Brinkley burrowed deeper into the hearts of Milford, Kansas, by splashing out for upgraded sewage and electrical systems for the town, housing for his employees and patients, a larger post office—in part to accommodate the increased correspondence his business generated—and he sponsored a Milford baseball team named—what else?—the Brinkley Goats. He was also made an honorary admiral in the Kansas Navy—a hollow-sounding title if ever there was one.

He shamelessly trolled Europe seeking more false validation by way of honorary degrees and found one in Italy. But such was the mounting pressure and influence of Morris Fishbein and the AMA that Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, had the degree revoked.

Oddly enough, by 1927 Brinkley and Minnie had been married fourteen years and only then were they able to have a child of their own. This drew unwanted questioning of the efficacy of his goat gland treatment. Brinkley deflected the rumors and turned his attentions to his enormously successful radio call-in program,
The Medical Question Box
, during which he fielded questions about health and offered cures such as notions, lotions, nostrums, and tinctures that he himself owned the rights to. Pharmacies that carried these over-the-counter medicines wired money back to Brinkley to the tune of $14,000 per week—at today's rates, the equivalent of more than $10,000,000 a year.

But all the money in the world wouldn't afford Brinkley immunity from the woes that were to come. Merck and Company, one of the pharmaceutical outfits whose products Brinkley was giving a bad name, sicced Fishbein and the AMA on him. At the same time, competitive radio stations began running reports critical of Brinkley. But the frosting on the cake came when the Kansas Medical Board investigated him and began procedures to revoke whatever license he'd been granted years before.

Their decision was based on the fact that Brinkley had been signing death certificates in growing numbers—forty-two by 1930. It was also noted that very few of those people were enfeebled or ill at all before visiting his clinic. In revoking his license, the KMB stated that Brinkley “has performed an organized charlatanism . . . quite beyond the invention of the humble mountebank.”

Barely half a year later, the Federal Radio Commission denied his request to renew his broadcaster's license, stating that his output was nearly all advertising and little else. They also said he was in violation of a number of laws and had broadcast obscene information. Brinkley sued the FRC but lost. The case,
Brinkley versus FRC
, has since become regarded as a landmark in broadcast law.

But instead of slowing him down, these setbacks seemed to invigorate the man. Brinkley had enough reserves of self-confidence that he took a run at the office of governor of Kansas. His main motivation? To appoint his own minions to the medical board and, in a roundabout way, get his medical license back.

During his campaign he pulled out all the huckster stops he could think of—he hired a pilot to ferry him in his own plane to all campaign stops. He sent a goat to a reporter who had been critical of him, and he made all manner of outlandish promises. Should he be elected governor, Brinkley vowed that each county in the state would have a lake, and that all citizens would enjoy low taxes, pensions for the aged, free textbooks for schoolchildren, and promises of better opportunities for blacks.

He was a write-in candidate, and a last-minute alteration to the qualifications for including him on the ballot resulted in his loss. It was later found that a huge number of ballots were disqualified on the barest of technicalities that, had they been overlooked, would have afforded him the win. Two years later he once again ran for governor, and once again he lost.

Faced with encroaching failure, Brinkley sold up in Milford, Kansas, and headed for the US-Mexico border. Mounting scandals notwithstanding, the Mexican government was keen to host such a personality as Brinkley. Whereas in Kansas his radio station offered but paltry power, in tiny Villa Acuna, Coahuila (now Ciudad Acuna), Brinkley's newly built “border blaster” station thrummed with fifty thousand watts of brute strength.

He named it the “Sunshine Station Between the Nations” and his broadcasts could be heard all the way to Kansas. By late 1932 he was given permission to broadcast at an unprecedented one million watts. Brinkley's broadcasts were picked up as far north as Canada. There are accounts of car headlights flicking on because of his broadcast strength, of telephone calls being saturated by the station, of steel bedsprings humming with the broadcasts, and of farmers and ranchers hearing it through their steel fences.