Dr. Brinkley's Miracle Cure For Impotence (with Betwixt The Sheets)

Pushkin. Milford, Kansas, nineteen seventeen, a forty six year old farmer walks into the local drug store and bashfully asks the town's young doctor if you can talk to him about a rather delicate matter. Although John Romulus Brinkley is a newcomer to the rural Kansas town, he's proven himself by helping the locals through a recent flu epidemic. Sensing the man's embarrassment, the doctor ushers him into a back room. The problem is, the man explains, hesitatingly, he's lacking in pep,

Well, thank you very much for having me on. I'm always happy to talk about goat glands.

I mean with the crossover between betwixt the Sheets and cautionary Tales, is it's not too hard to find?

No, this has been a long time coming, hasn't it?

Really? No pun intended, but yes, it really has, it really has. I am very, very keen to hear more about doctor Brinkley, if you will pardon the pun. His story is nuts.

He was a fucking lunatic, That's who he was.

So I think we already gathered that, but give us the backstory. So before we get into these unusual treatments, what was his early life like with was there any sign of this interest in goat lands?

What we know about him is gathered from his own testimony and testimony of people he knew him, and various historical records. But you've got to take everything with a pinch assault when it comes to Brinkley, because he was the master of spin. He appears to have been born in Carolina only a decade after the Civil War had ended, so you sort of have to factor that into it. It was the bloodiest conflict America had ever seen, so it's a post war world. Everyone's kind of walking around

Yeah, I could use that.

Yes, For some reason, he thought that a goat was the most hygienic animal. That's he first read flag that one, isn't it.

I have all sorts of thoughts about goats, but hygienic is not the one that doesn't leap to mind of it. Maybe that's just my own ignorance.

Maybe that's just our goat prejudice. But anyway, he thought that they were fantastic. He gets married to his first wife, a woman called Sally Wick, and they go on the road as this kind of traveling medicine act together. So you've already got the start of this combining of quack medicine and showmanship. So they would go to rural towns and sort of put on a big show for the local folks and then flog them well snake oil really just just nonsense and rubbish, but they were pretty good at it.

As a famous economics paper about the history of the market for snake oil, and it grew hugely during the period we're discussing, so the late eighteen hundreds and then the first half of the twentieth century, huge market, and a lot of it involved circuses, So you had to get a crowd in order to sell them whatever it was that you were selling them, and circus is a good way to attract attention.

It is completely mad. I mean, would you take medical advice from a clown at a circus?

Nothing against clowns, but that wouldn't be my first board of call. But I guess when we think about the demand for what we might call unproven treatments today being that's true. So on the TikTok on YouTube, and again it's attention. You've got an influencer, somebody who you're paying attention to because they're doing interesting things, and then suddenly they're trying to sell you their latest goop or creams or pills and not so different.

But if he'd been around today, I think he would have been on TikTok, would Brinkley. But he was traveling around towns, he's doing his act, he's selling nonsense, and then at some point he tries to settle down in Chicago, and he must have had a thought along the way of like, I'm not really a doctor.

Yeah, well, okay, spoiler, he's not a doctor.

Something must have occurred to like, I'm treating all these people and I'm not a medical person.

So he had no medical qualification?

Can do attitude? Tim? Is what he had? He had?

Did he claim to be a doctor or did he have any sort of qualifications at all?

Not at this point, and the qualifications that he does get are best described as gubious. He went to study at the Chicago Bennett Medical School. Eclectic medicine was just sort of the study of botany, herbal cures and a bit of physiotherapy as well, So it's already a little bit okay, and it's not an accredited college that he's studying at, and he doesn't even manage to finish it

Okay, so he's got a fig leaf of a qualification, but he hasn't any got any serious training. And then he ends up in Milford, Kansas. How did he end up there from Chicago?

He ditches his wife by the way in between these two points, and his children, he just leaves them and he takes up with another woman called Minnie, who he bigamously marries. And at this point he's trying to run a kind of a medical center in Chicago where he's basically injecting men with colored water and telling them that this is good for their manly vigor. And the authorities get wise to it, and so he needs to get out there quick smart. And there's an advert for the

Yeah, and then yeah, flu hits and he tends people.

He was really popular.

I mean, aside manner will get you along well. And with flu. I mean at the time, there's no flu vaccine. I guess there's no treatment, so you just kind of like be nice to people and.

Be nice to people.

Yeah.

Yeah, But he was really popular when he first arrives because he's this new doctor. Nobody's questioning that he calls himself a doctor. It's a small rual town. There's a few hundred people, and they're just thrilled to have a doctor.

And then somehow he makes this leap from eclectic medicine, so basically colored water and some herbs and spices, and I mean that's pretty ordinary. It's a lot of people doing that at this point in history. He leaps into the goat gland game. Yeah. I know that there are different accounts of the first operation, but we know that he did, in fact in plant goatlands. So what where would I really I'm going to regret asking this. Where did he put them?

Well, he put them into the testicles, into the scrotums of men, and there are descriptions of the surgery that he did.

Scrotums being stretchedy there's room for four testicles rather than two.

That's you've pretty much got it. So he had this idea that you had to use the goat's gland within twenty minutes of severing it. So he would basically castraight the goats, cut out the gland from the testicle, put it in salted water to keep it at room temperature, and then rush it into the other room where he would have numbed up his victims scrotum with local anesthetic, and then with two incisions he would put the entire

The thinking is part of the story, actually, which is that you've got these quacks, but the mainstream of medical practice is not necessarily any better. It doesn't necessarily have any more evidence. They've just got more authority.

And it made sense to them in a way of like, right, we've discovered that testosterone is important for men and it makes them feel peppy, and we've discovered it's made in testicles. So if we take a testicle and we put it in another testicle, see how it's fallen apart quite quickly.

Now.

But I was like, I was with you right up until that.

It feels like spinal tap. Four testicles for test is more than two.

So that was the theory behind it. So you've got serge Varanov doing it with monkey glands. Apparently he wasn't in certain the entire glands. He was cutting slivers off and then stitching it up inside men's scrota. He at least was medically trained and had some gloss of pseudoscience with it. Brinkley had nothing. He just had a scalpel and a goat.

And the thing that I find most astonishing about this is that a load of men seemed really keen to have this done. It was hugely popular around the block.

It was hugely popular. The gland therapy, as it was called at the time, was really big in the twenties and thirties. You could even buy like rejuvenating face cream that claimed it was made from glands. It was like the thing because it was like a pseudo hormone treatment. The absolute apex of it was having actual testicles. So apparently the first person that came to Brinkley and when would you please put a goat testicle inside mine? And he went, oh, I'll have to have a think about

Oh wow, baby.

So if I shared that well.

I'm looking at a cute baby. It doesn't look at all like a goat, does it. I mean a toddler, I guess, other than a baby, but it looks about one. But yes, Kansas surgeon uses goat glands to cure sterility. First goat gland baby, Dr John R. Brinkley and Billy amazing.

So he uses this as an opportunity to launch this incredible treatment. This young boy, Billy is used as the definitive proof and it's pedaled as this cure. It'll get rid of impotence, it will pep you up, it'll rejuvenate your sex life. And he was charging people. Well, it's about seven hundred and fifty dollars, but in today's money, that's well over ten grand.

Off the top of my head, I would say that's probably a year's income, depends exactly how you make that.

Just show how desperate people were for this treatment though.

Yeah, and people today spend a great deal for fertility treatment. You know, it's enormously important.

Of course, just cast your mind back to when viagra was launched.

Yeah, people lost.

Their minds with it, didn't it. There was reports of doctors having to stamp prescriptions. With a rubber stamp because the hand was cramping from signing so many of them. So that's how popular viagra was. This was their viagra, Yes, and they really thought that it was going to work. So he is cues around the block, and not just

This is one of the reasons why nerds like me are very keen on randomized trials, because people are able to convince themselves that all sorts of things work. Impotence is sometimes just in your head. Yeah, Sometimes it's got a physical cause. Sometimes you're overthinking it.

Yeah.

And I can well imagine that this guy went home from his goatland operation full of confidence and suddenly he he could get it up.

So when they look at placebo effect, it's more effective if the person a ministering the treatment looks like a doctor has a white coatconn dot cells doctor. If there's some level of surgical intervention, we're more inclined to believe. And this has got all of the above, plus when they go home they actually do have a lump in their scrotum that is a coach testical. So I mean, I am unaware if there is any medical benefit whatsoever to do in this. I'm going to go out on a limb and say.

No, Kate, you can't argue with results. Baby Billy was born. Baby Billy, the first goatland baby. Customers are happy. I can't imagine that anything is going to go wrong, but we'll find out after the break. You are listening to Cautionary Tales with me Tim Harford with my special guest, doctor Kate Lister of the brilliant Betwixt the Sheets podcast, And so after the break we will hear the next twist in the story about how the goat gland doctor

It was big, and it was growing all the time because the more he did it, the more he self publicized. The more people wanted to come and see him, so it becomes this beast that's feeding on itself. And he would do things like get famous newspaper editors to come and have a transplant, and they would then report on their progress. Some guy from the La Times, Henry Chandler, came down, and I know, I know that's that's commitment to journalists.

I've med a couple of newspapers. I'm not sure they'd.

Go for the more testicons, but he would do things like that, and then he would and then so then he's got major newspapers writing about him and his absolute true degra is. He leapt into radio and he utilized that in such a powerful way. He set up his own radio station and they called it KFKB.

Kansas First Kansas.

Kansas First, Kansas Best.

But it's very much it's the TikTok of the nineteen twenty. This is the new cutting edge way of communicating.

And it really was cutting edge as well. And he would have local acts and local music groups come on and do their little bit, like local choirs would come on and sing. But as well, he had his own segment twice daily where he would dispense medical advice, which you're into very dubious territory here. Again, people from all over the country would write in about their medical complaints.

All over the country. I thought it was a local radio station.

It had a really big reach. It it wasn't listened to just in Kansas. Is that the power of this thing was enormous. I think at one point it was the biggest radio station in the country, the most popular and most listened to radio show.

So he's a huge success. Massive that sort of success must start to attract screutiny.

Well it does. It's not local radio, so other people are listening in, and you've got a situation where Brinkley is reading out random people's medical complaints, diagnosing them live on the air, and then prescribing a treatment that only his pharmacy could supply. Oneing is going off there. But it was again massively, massively popular. But you can imagine other doctors, real doctors with actual credentials, listening into this and going.

Hang on a minute, hang on a minute.

Just give me a second. So he's getting way, way, way too big for his boots. So he's making loads of money, and his nemesis was an actual proper doctor Maurice Fishbeine, who was a member of the American Medical Association, and he was hell bent on exposing quacks and charlatans, of which, as we've already said, there were many, and this was his life's work. So he was on to Brinkley pretty quickly.

And he didn't hold back, did he.

He did not, He did not.

Got one quote in front of me says he described Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort, whose radio station was being used to victimize people and to enrich himself, which I don't know seems fair enough.

All true, that's exactly what was happening. But you've got to remember that Brinkley had managed to cultivate this huge popularity in the local community and well in the wider community as well. So to begin with Maurice Fishbeine, there's this sort of lone voice, like all you mean trying to take away our young successful doctor. And of course the Milford residents love it because it's bringing loads of money to the town. It's bringing loads of business into the town.

They don't want to challenge, they don't want to challenge.

Shut up, shut up.

I mean I found this when Cautionary Tails did the story of the Radium Dial Company and these poor young women who were giving themselves radium poisoning working painting this radioactive paint on watchfaces and other things. One of the problems they faced was that not only did the doctors not take them seriously, and not only did the company deny everything, but their local community ostracized them. Yeah, because they were like, you are going to shut down this factory.

Jobs, this is income. And it's also put Milford on the map. Great the capital, isn't it fabulous? And there are loads of people out there really think that he's helped them. There are many others that did not. He was sued at least twelve times in the nineteen thirties because unsurprisingly, these operations were not the success. He's not going to give the testimonials of the people who wander back in and going scrotum's gone purple. There were people

So do the authorities do anything?

They do Eventually, I mean they have to get involved because he's probably to seeing medicine without a license. He's operating on people with no qualifications or reason to do this at all. So eventually it is frowned upon. Even in nineteen thirties, it's cause for people to have a think about it. So in nineteen thirty he was called before the Kansas Medical Board to face eleven charges. It

So when the Kansas Medical Board looked into his qualifications and what sort of investigation did they do?

They did a pretty thorough investigation, actually, which in an act of it's not even confidence, it's just lunacy. But this is how much of a charlatan he was. He actually invited members of the medical Board came and watch him do one of his procedures.

And they came, and they came.

Of course they came. So representatives come down and they watch him literally sewing goat balls into a human being with unsterilized equipment, at which point he's like tadah and is genuinely shocked that they go, holy, no more for you, No, you are done. It's worth saying as well here that the boy goats survived, but the girl goats that he took overaries out of the graft into women did not.

You will know one think of the goats.

No, just somebody justice for the goats. That's all that I'm saying. They often get left out of this particular story.

I see that his license to practice was revoked on the grounds of gross immorality and unprofessional conduct.

Yes, you can't get much firmer than that.

Can you No, you can't. Okay, he's lost his license to practice medicine, potentially a disaster. He's still got the radio though, He's still got that potential cash cow.

He does, and it's a big cash cow as well, And he's still got his Doctor Brinkley Show, and he's still offering up medical advice and people are still writing in and he's still pedaling his quack cures and it's all right for a while, but our mate Morris Fishbeine hasn't forgotten about it, and the pressure is now coming on the Kansas authorities to investigate whether it is ethical or not to have a disbarred lunatic offering up medical advice.

Yes, and the Federal Radio Commission get involved in the end, the spoil sports.

Spoil sports. But again, that's exactly what he is doing. He isn't a medically qualified doctor. The advice that he's given up is just gibberish, and he's administering care to actual sick people. They're writing in with things that really are wrong with them.

He's got no idea what he's talking about, not.

A clue, not a clue. So eventually they have to pull the plug. On it and no more surgery and no more radio for you.

So things are not looking good for doctor John R. Brinkley because he's not a doctor anymore, and neither is he a DJ anymore. He's lost his radio show. Surely, though, this can't be the end. This man is a master of reinvention. Doctor Kate Lister will be back to he knew his story after the break. You're listening to Cautionary Tales with me Tim Harford and my guest, doctor Kate

If there was any other normal human being, you'd just give up, wouldn't you. You'd be I've been shamed on a national level here, I've been exposed as the worst kind of charlatan. But not Brinkley. He decides politics. That's the place for me. That's what I will do. So he who.

Would have thought that a failed convent would be attracted by politics?

It was the olden days, Tim will We'll never see the like again. So he runs twice to be the governor of Kansas.

That's a big job.

It's a big job.

Well, he's not just running for mayor governor of Kansas.

As we've discovered, not being remotely qualified for a position is no obstacle to Brinkley. He just can do attitude.

And so he's got all the stars of his KFKB radio station who can kind of chill for him and support him. How does it go? I mean, is he is he crushed?

Not nearly as epically as you would hope that he would be. It's a reasonably close call. I think eventually he came in third. I think. So they had this rule in place where if the vote didn't match exactly the name that he's running under, which was John R. Brinkley, then the vote would be discounted. So if somebody didn't put J. R. Brinkley, if they just put something like

So he doesn't win in nineteen thirty because of all those votes for Doc Brinkley and John Brinkley and he doesn't get in. He nearly makes it. He tries again Ineen thirty two, loses again. Can't be it for Brinkley.

Well, the second time that he ran, it did more damage to his public image because his opponents realized that they could make a mockery of him, and they did. They held him up as just this crank goat ball guy who's been disbarred and discredited, and so it created even done.

More damage earlier. But okay, eventually they figure out that sort of time.

Actually, so he upsticks and he moves to dl Rio, Texas, which is way down there on the border, where he tries again to practice medicine. Only this time he takes an increased interest in people's prostate glands.

Why do I think that's worse? Somehow, I think that's even worse.

But okay, I don't think that he's injecting or grafting anything into anybody, but he's certainly examining people. And this is like a world of suppositories and it's all nonsense. And again it's the same thing. It's that, Oh, it's manly vigor it will rejuvenate you. He gets another radio show, radio another radio show, which again proves to be incredibly popular, and again is his downfall. Because he can't just go somewhere and shut up and do his weird prostate thing.

But the border is important there, right, because he can put the radio transmitter in Mexico. Yeah.

Yeah, So he gets around the American authorities that way, because he's not allowed to do it in America but from Mexico, even though they can hear it in America.

Yeah. I think they called it a border blaster. So he's got this massive radio mast near his home, but it's in Mexico, and therefore he's immune to American regulation.

And again, this show is broadcast across the states. You could pick it up in every single one of the states. It was that powerful.

So he resurrects his career, if indeed it ever really went away. By nineteen thirty eight, he's got another hospital in ar Yeah, he's living the high life. He's got mansions, he's got yachts, cadillacs, luxury holidays. Nothing can go wrong for Doc Brinkley.

Yeah, but Maurice Fishburne hadn't forgotten about him.

Oh right, he's old nemesis, old nemesis.

And of course, because Brinkley can't keep quiet and stay off the radar, Maurice Fishbine is just like, right, I'll have you, and he publishes a number of exposes calling him a quack and a charlatan and in a is it a desperate act? Is it a mad act? It's certainly what Oscar Wilde ended up doing. Brinkley, to defend himself against this, decides that he's going to sue him for libel. Bold move a terrible don't do it if what the person is saying is perfectly.

True, because it all then gets laid out in court, all of it, All of.

It gets laid out in court. The goat glands, the unsterilized equipment they're operating while drunk, the fact that forty two people that we know of died from these awful operations because of infection, and god knows what else, and how many goats died. Justice for the goats.

I think we're probably gonna lead with the forty two people dying suggestion. But yes, fair enough, but that's not good for Brinkley, And.

None of it's good for Brinkley. Obviously, the court finds in fish mind's favor.

I love the jury verdict is that Brinkley should be considered a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well understood meaning of these words like it. I like it.

Yeah, And there you go. And now there's a legal precedent for it. He is legally a quack and a charlatan.

And then I would love to have been a flower on a wall when this letter arrives. The Irs sue him for tax fraud.

Yeah, because he wasn't paying his taxes. Of course he wasn't.

Who would have thought?

Who would have thought?

And then the Post Office sue him for male fraud.

Yeah, people sued him. It's like shark circling, isn't it? And like once somebody's made the first bite is they're all going him. He loses everything and we're not going to feel remotely sorry for him at all.

Right, So this is the end of the nineteen thirties. It sounds like it's basically the end for Brinkley's career.

Pretty much all avenues have been cut after him. He kind of limps along for a little bit, muttering about the injustice of it and about trying to resurrect some kind of nonsense career, but he eventually suffers multiple heart attacks, so his health is failing, and he died in nineteen forty two, penniless and in disgrace.

Kate, this has been a joy. Whenever we have one of our cautionary conversations, I always try to reflect, always want to learn the lessons from history. So one lesson I've learned is that I'm not going to have goat testicles implanted in my scrotum.

A wise move.

But maybe there were who knows, maybe there were even broader lessons to draw. What do you take from all this?

I think there are lots of lessons from this for the modern world, because medical quackery is still very much with us. There's still people out there pedaling or manners of lotions and potions and pills and powders claiming to do this, that and the other, and it doesn't do any than of the sort. And I think check your credentials as well as like look into the background of

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how much gets sold basically by influencers. Now you know, it's on YouTube, it's on TikTok, And actually the main reason why people buy it is because, well, they like the influence, so they find them impressive. They think they're cool, and that's enough.

We should just be a bit firm with that and just say no, we shouldn't be selling nonsense to people, no matter what it does.

I'm all in favor of actual evidence evidence. You know. The other thing this whole story reminded me of Kate is do you know lydia E pinkm Lily the Pink?

I do know the story of Lily the Pink.

Yes, So we did a cautionary tale about her. And as you know, she developed this medicinal compound most efficacious in every case, and it was basically just booze and some herbs and probably didn't do much harm. Probably also didn't do much good. But what I was really struck by is, oh, yeah, she's a quack, right, there's no evidence that this works. She's got no particular credentials, and they set up this operation and it makes a huge amount of money. Then I looked at what the actual

And Lydia Pinkham was another master personal image, wasn't she. She had her face on billboards up and down the country. Is this trustworthy woman with her efficacious compounds so famous?

Great little story when Queen Victoria died some newspapersors didn't actually have a photograph of Queen Victoria, so they slapped a picture of Lydia Pinkham and Stixley. You know, lady of a certain age looks about right.

Close enough, close enough?

Yeah, well, I suppose that this is the broader lesson, right. If we don't have the real thing, we go for a substitute. That's true if it's a photograph of Queen Victoria or Lydia Pinkham. But it's also true for medicines. Yeah. So two very different characters, but fundamentally they're both spotting a gap in the market and exploiting it.

Yeah, well, or marketing themselves really successfully.

Marketing is a It's the best drug, isn't it? Kate, This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me. What do we call it?

Betwixt the Cautionary Cautionary Tales?

Well, if people would like a pure and unadulterated shot of Betwixt the Sheets. The podcast is available in all the usual pod.

Places available wherever you get your podcast. Just give us a Google and we will jump.

Up and just give us a five second. What is Betwixt the Sheets? For people who don't know.

Betwixt the sheet is us having a look at the ced side of history and getting betwixt the sheets of the great and the good, and they're not so great in the good as well, and learning what our ancestors got up to in the sack.

It's a joy to listen to. I love it, so I hope some more people will discover it. Katelister, thank you so much.

Thank you.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harfor with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Alice Fines and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A daf Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough,