John Brinkley: The Quackiest Quack in History?

should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, So this is stuff you should have. Old timey history edition, Quackery sub edition. Let's go. Yeah, we've covered a lot of quacks over the years. It's kind of fun. I want to shout out the listener who wrote in about

this one. This is where the idea came from, because I had never heard of John our Brink, the famous quack of the nineteen twenties and thirties, but you know who did, and I'm gonna say I'm gonna spell it first. His name is Matt s. E. J n O W s Ki from Austin, Texas. And I wrote Matt back and said, hey, man, we're gonna shout you out. Is the N silent? I figured it was Sajowski and he said the following, The N is not silent. The J is like an H and the W was like an F.

So then he phonetically spelled out as uh Senofski. Oh wow, there ain't no F in this thing. But it's uh Matt's sinofsky. Very nice. That's a that's a new one on me. So way to go, Matt, for your life. Yes, so Matt, Matt's in this idea of John R. Brinkley, who was a very famous and wealthy quack in the nineteen twenties and thirties who um Olivia helped us put this together, which is a great I'm sorry to Libya

for having to do this. But he had this procedure called the goat gland procedure, yeah, which we'll get into in more detail later, but just as a way of setting it up, it's basically the practice of zeno transplantation. And also Olivia wanted to shout out the book The Bizarre Career of John R. Brinkley by R. Alton Lee from two thousand and two, a great book and seems to be the book on John R. Brinkley. But Zeno transplantation is sort of what he was dabbling in, and

that's how we're going to start this thing out. Yeah, which is a thing. It's just using organs or tissue or whatever body parts from other species in humans, right, So a pig heart trans zeno transplantation. And it's something humans have been trying to crack for a little while because we place such little value on animals that we are like, well, let's just harvest them for parts for ourselves.

There's a lot of stuff that we've run into still run into, like a specialized, weird exotic infections that you can get just utterly rejecting your body, rejecting the organ or the tissue and actually getting mad at you for even trying it. But it's still going on, and there's a long history of trying it that goes at least back to the sixteen hundreds with a French physician named Jean Baptiste Denis, which is a great French name, and

he started using blood from animals for blood transfusions. Yeah, and I think that was kind of the first first whirl at melding our two worlds our two bodies. And they banned it for a while. It had mixed results, and France said, now, you know, we shouldn't do this for a while. Yeah, and this is this is seventeenth

century France yanally, so good for them. In the nineteenth century they started messing around with skin grafts from different animals, and it seems like the reports were like success rates were mixed. But now we think modern medicine says, you know, what it probably was was more like it didn't work like a graph but sort of like a skin like a band aid, while your skin underneath repaired itself, right, if it worked at all, That's probably what was going on.

And they said we should just make band aids, make them out of pigeon skin exactly. So one of the other things is kind of like tangential to that, but very much involved, is the idea that different parts of different animals can give you, can can rejuvenate your vigor or give you sexual vitality, you know, like make you strong,

like bowl kind of thing by eating bowls testicles. That's the kind of the premise behind it, and it's not technically zeno transplantation because you're not inserting it into your body through like surgery, but by ingesting it. It is kind of close as far as that whole thing goes. I mean, you're really splitting hairs. If you're like, that's not zeno transplantation, why are you even bringing that up? Yeah, and this, you know, this factors into the eventual goat

glad procedure we're going to get to. That's why we mentioned it. But that's why I brought it up. Yeah, I mean, for since the ancient Romans, there have been generally men that you know, something happens to men when they get older. That's why they have ed drugs these days, because you know, virility goes down and maybe a rectile

dysfunction happens. So this has always been the case, and even in ancient Rome they realized this when they got older, it was sort of a downhill slope sexually speaking, and so they would do things like drink hawks, seamen or eat rabbit genitalia and literally just sort of like eating these things like you mentioned, eating bolt testicles or whatever

has always been a thing. It seems like that hawks Seaman came out of nowhere, So apologies to anybody who was eating breakfast right the good band name though, especially if you were eating cereal with milk. All right, there is a guy named Charles Eduard or sorry, Charles Eduard Brown, how do you say brown? And En Francais Brown Sicard. He injected himself with some serum that he squeezed from the testicles of dogs and the testicles of guinea pigs, and he said, by god, this is amazing. I feel

thirty years younger and I'm seventy two. I feel like I'm clearly in my forties. And you guys got to try this, and it's spread pretty quickly. But then the other physicians are like, it's not making me feel anything at all except grossed out, So this is probably just a placebo effect that you were suffering from. They're like, still,

let's get back to it. Let's keep trying. And then before Brinkley, not too long before, there was a pretty legit doctor named Sergei Vornov who was doing surgeries where he would use monkey testicles, as in transplant monkey testicles. And this was in France, again in Paris, and then eventually thyroid glands from like a chimpanzee trying to cure

thyroid deficiency. So again, this just idea of xeno transplantation has been around for a long time before John Brinkley was born in the hills of North Carolina in eighteen eighty five. Yes, by the way, Sergei Vornov's work, I think is what led to the monkey gland cocktail. Oh yeah, yeah, gin, orange juice, grenadine and absinthe. It's named monkey glander talking about that operation of getting monkey testicles implanted in you. So they made a cocktail over it. That's probably a

safer approach. So Beta North Carolina, Beta North Carolina. It's in the Appalachian Mountains. It's in Western North Carolina or WNC. And he was born into an odd family arrangement. His father was also named John, and he was a mountain doctor and Appalachian folk doctor basically. And he was married to a woman named Sally Mingus and they were happily married apparently until Sarah Candice Burnett, who was known as Candice, who was Sally's niece, came to live with them and

very quickly got pregnant by John Senior. She was twenty four, he was fifty seven, and that's where John Romulus Brinkley came from. Um and it just got hotter from there, right, yeah, So John Junior then his mom is what would that relation even be if it was, well, it wouldn't be any relation to him, really, Sally mingus Well, no, no, nos,

his his his mom Sarah. That would be his mom. No, no, no. But what I was trying to pin another an extra relation, if you know what I mean, But there wouldn't be one, because Sally wasn't even related to him, no, except by marriage to his father. Right. Oh, you're saying no, you're right, You're right. Yeah. No. I was about to be like, no, it's his cousin, but you're absolutely right. She's There were

no like, yeah, no family shenanigans. But the long and short of it is is that his his real mom, Sarah, died at twenty four. John Senior died not too long after that, and I believe by the time he was ten years old he was in being raised by Sally, who was his dad's wife. But no relation, right, Candice's aunt. Yeah, din't that odd? It is? And it's not. We made it more confusing than it is I don't think so. Okay,

So actually he was like Brinkley. He was one of the great quacks of all time, like one of the greatest ever to live. And he showed kind of an early talent for quackery. He was a good student in school, but he left at sixteen, ran off and got married, and he and his first wife, Sally, they had a

medicine show, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're hawking tonics that you just completely made up out a whole cloth, but you're doing it by being super entertaining and that kind of like m Olivia helped us with this, like you said, and she, as she put it, it kind of set the stage for his later career. He only did it for about a year or so before he went off and did some other ite or at work.

But apparently that was the bug that bit him all the way back then when he was like twenty early twenties, it was. And just to clear up the Sally who was his wife, was not his lady who raised him, Sally who was not his mom. No, although that really would have completed the circle had it really would have.

And Libby also points out something that this was at a time when the medical establishment was not super established yet, so the mountain folk doctor was perhaps made way more trustworthy than this modern, learned doctor who went to fancy medical school and like, I don't want your your real you know, medicines. I want a blood letting or a

purgative or some ither mectin or something. And it was definitely one of those situations where I was like, Wow, it's interesting how history can repeat itself all these years later. I was going to say, I'm so glad we've moved on from that after all these years. Exactly, it is crazy. I mean, that's exactly what's going on. It's like, oh, you're an expert. I don't trust you. I trust this guy who's trying to put a crystal in my anus. Well, there were a lot of weird similar similarities with his

story and like modern times to me. But I don't want to delve into this too much. Okay, all right, but let's still into medical school, which is what Brinkley finally did at Bennett Medical College. It was what was called an eclectic medical school, a lot of botanical remedies and stuff like that, and it was back then it

was a genuine branch of medical practice. But what he didn't know is that it was sort of like when I went to my little NYU film school for two summers and they taught me how to edit film on the flatbed machine, and like six months later they threw that all in the trash and said, now we're digital. He went to Eclectic Medical School, and very soon after they were like, you know what, we don't really count that as medical school, and we're the AMA and we're

the deciders. Yeah. The Carnegie Foundation, I think, commissioned what came to be known as the Flexner Report in nineteen ten, which basically do a thing on that we will someday. Sure. Yeah, but the Flexner Report basically said, we've just surveyed all of modern medicine in the United States and it is in sad shape. We basically suggest that you should follow the biomedical model and feverishly stamp out any competition to it. And that's kind of where the AMA went. Yeah, exactly.

So Brinkley now has this degree from Bennett College. He it's not to say that it was a pure bunk degree or anything like that. He did go to lectures where there were real doctors. This one into chronologist Harry Hower. I'm sorry. Henry Hower was an indo chronologist who taught him, and he's where he sort of got the idea for these glandular extracts, yeah, to heal the body. And I believe that's where Brinkley was kind of like, all right, let me put that in my hip pocket. Right. Harrower

was like, try this adreno chrome. It'll really mess you up. So Brinkley was not a good guy. We'll just go ahead and spoil that. Yeah, this isn't one of those stories where it's like, oh, the guy took on the medical establishment, or the guy was like a David and Goliath, or you know, he persisted or persevered, or he was just like a rapscallion who was still lovable. He was a bad guy. And um, there's a really early example of that where his marriage with Sally was on the

rocks and um, she filed for divorce. So he took their daughter, Wanda, their first and only child at the time, to Canada and basically held her hostage there until Sally agreed to reunite with him. Yeah. That's called kidnapping. Yeah, literal kid napping. Um, and that's a that's a good example of the kind of thing that he would do. And if you see pictures of this guy, he's got almost like a slight Casper milktoast continge to him. But he was not at all Casper milktoast. He was. He

was as he was, not a good guy. You'll see, just just trust me. Yeah he got he's got a bad look in his eye, you can tell, but like he's got soft, soft, rounded face. Yeah he was. He was a softy. He also married his second wife, Minnie Talitha, when he was still married to Sally. I believe it took a few years even where he had two wives before he got formally divorced. So not a good guy

on the home front. He drops out of medical school he never finished, I believe, and then ended up I think he did end up finishing medical school, yeah, years later at the eclectic Medical College of Kansas City in nineteen fifteen. Didn't keep him from practicing doctoring in that sort of interim period, but he and his wife, his second wife, Millie, I'm sorry. Minie found an ad in the paper in nineteen seventeen from Milford, Kansas that said, hey,

we're a small town two thousand people. We need a doctor and someone to run our pharmacy. Many had her own little dubious medical degree at this point, and so they said, all right, we're gonna move to small town, Kansas and be the town doctors. And that's what they did. So they were the medical providers for this entire town. I've seen two hundred people was the population at the time. I've seen two thousand, but I saw two hundred on like an old PBS documentary on this, so I'm going

to go with that one. I am going low. So the Brinkley's provided care like they weren't. They didn't just immediately start drifting the town. They actually did help see them through the nineteen eighteen flu epidemic. They were fine, like there was. People didn't have any real complaints about them. And then, apparently just out of total happenstance, a farmer showed up at the practice. This farmer went unnamed, but this is supposedly the first goat gland patient, and it

was the farmer's idea to transplant coad. So remember other people are trying this, it's not completely out of left field, but it was the farmer's idea and from different accounts, including one there's a documentary called Nuts with an exclamation point that says that the doctor or the farmer kind of had to talk Brinkley into it, that he was revolted by the idea at first, and then the farmers like, i'll pay you, and he's like, okay, sure, let's do it.

A you're gonna read the quote go ahead. So the farmer I think Brinkley had made a joke about the goats were so virile, and the farmer said, why he didn't quote go ahead and put a pair of goat glands in me transplant them. Grabbed him on the way i'd grabbed a pound suite on an apple stray. I don't know what any of that last part means. I think a pound sweet is a type of apple, and apple stray is like a wild apple sapling that's sprouting up,

so you want to make work out of it. Look at you, Hey, I just totally made that up, and I'm sure we'll get tons of listener mail saying jos is so wrong, he couldn't be wronger. Actually, somehow an apple stray is really offensive. Right, So Brinkley hesitated at first, Like you mentioned, and then the farmer said, I'll even bring you the testicles of the goat and put him in my scrow to him, and that's what he did.

And so what we don't know is this farmer's name, and so we don't really have a great idea of how this really went because it's not officially on record. Doesn't really matter they I mean, sure it mattered to him. But the long and short of it is is that this procedure happened, and word got around, and all of a sudden a second patient stepped forward, mister William Stittsworth and said, hey, I would like this goat thing too, And Brinkley said, I'll want up you. I'll put some

goat testicles in you. I will put some goat ovaries in your wife. And then Livia wrote the best sentence she's ever written for us when she said, within a year the couple had a child who, almost unbelievably, they named Billy Billy the goat gland child. Oh wow, So this was the start of something big. As Bert backrec put it, yea, how much money was it? He charged him seven fifty bucks just ten grand today, which if this were a legitimate surgery, ten grand's not that bad

in today's money, right, a pretty good deal. But it wasn't a legitimate surgery. It was a completely made up surgery where basically he would take the testicles a slice from a testicle of a young goat about three months old, specifically a Toggenberg goat, which were these tiny, cute, very

clean kinds of goats that don't smell. I've seen or I heard or I smelled, and they would He would take these little slices of testicles, make an incision in your scrowed them, put the testicle goat testicle slice in there, so you back up ten fifteen minutes, you were done, and that was it. He might as well put like

a Tonka truck or something in your scrotum. Like there was nothing biologically happening to this except maybe increasing your risk of infection, yeah, and genetic chimerism, where all of a sudden you had Toggenberg goat DNA mixed in with your own. Yeah. So it's not like he was when we said testicles. He wasn't surgically attaching testicles to blood vessels or anything like that. He told people that he

was attaching blood vessels, but he would. I'm surprised he even bothered to put the slice testicle in there, to be honest, Well, he had some honor. He also had a pretty good eye for advertising. And maybe that's a good place to take a break. Oh yeah, all right, we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna talk about how he sort of revolutionized PR in a way right after this stuff. You should know, all right, so we mentioned he's doing this goat gland procedure, Brinkley is he's

a quack. He hired an advertising consultant and then later on when hire a PR person, and these were this was sort of the beginnings of this kind of job in the United States, and started to get the word out in newspapers such that he got some pretty prominent patients in there, didn't he He did, And the one that really paid off the most was a guy named Harry Chandler. And thanks to his press, I mean, he got some crazy press throughout the country. His name became very,

very famous, and people started traveling to Milford. And because of this this you know, renown, this publisher or owner actually of the Los Angeles Times put himself up as a patient. And I've seen either he put himself up or one of his editors up as a patient and said, here's the deal. If this is successful, we will sing your praises forever in the Los Angeles Times, which will legitimize you in ways you can't even imagine. If it's not successful, we're going to ruin you. What do you

want to do? And he did it. He worked on either Harry Chandler or his editor, and it worked in whatever way this could possibly work, and the LA Times started singing the praises of doctor Brinkley, and he went from kind of famous to a global superstars as far as like a quack can get. Yeah. And also, Keyhan put a pin in this. Harry Chandler own Los Angeles' first radio station, KHJ, And this will all kind of come back into focus in a minute. But things really

picked up. Brinkley built his own sixteen bed hospital in Milford, Kansas, a town of either two hundred or two thousand, but it was the population was rising at least by sixteen because I get the feeling those beds were always full of men who wanted these Arkan assassin Arkanson arkans and goats which he kept out back. And you would walk you out there. You can say, you can even pick out your goat. Who I mean, did he was he

killing these goats? I couldn't find any ink um what happened to I have to surmise that he did because he would order forty or fifty him at a time, and once he took their testicles, there were worth nothing to him. Why would he keep them alive? So yeah, I think all these goats died. Yeah, that's the worst part of this whole thing. So pick out your goat, will put these testicles in you, or at least part

of them. And not only is it good for this, but sort of like with the medicine shows in the quackery of snake oil salesman, he's like he rattled off a list of other things that it would help, right, like schizophrenia, diabetes, high blood pressure. Apparently he did a goat ovary procedure to treat a spinal tumor on a woman. Basically anything that could be wrong with you. He said,

this goat glam procedure is going to help. Yeah. And then in addition, remember he was an eclectic medical practitioner, so he was into herbs and tonics and tinctures and stuff like that, and he sold patent medicines as well, at a time where you could make a lot of money selling patent medicine. So he had this thriving surgical practice that people would travel to Kansas to participate in. And then he was also selling patent medicines too, So he was doing pretty well for himself by this time,

this is the mid twenties. Yeah, and spoiler, by the end of this thing, he was a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy human being. I saw between nineteen thirty three and thirty eight he made twelve million dollars and that I did the old West egg converter. Of course, two hundred and fifty six million dollars is what that's equal to today. This guy was made that from a made up procedure that didn't do anything. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And again one of the reasons why is because he ended up

becoming kind of a media pioneer. He made his name in this goat gland operation, but he did a lot of innovative things. In the early nineteen twenties, he made a film called Rejuvenation through Gland Transplantation. You think big whop,

it's a it's a movie that touts his practice. But this was nineteen twenty two that people weren't really using film for this stuff at the time, So he was one of the first, I guess it was one of the first kind of infomercials basically yeah, And so he bought a radio station, actually created a radio station, KFKB, Kansas first Kansas Best. It was the first radio station in Kansas and just the fourth in the United States.

This is nineteen twenty three. And one of the things he would do would be basically like you just described infomercials, but on radio about his treatments, his patent medicines. He also had other stuff too, where he would have like in No Brother, where art Thou like the Sea Route was bringing Yes, it was bringing in like this country acts and recording him and playing him on the radio.

This is the exact same thing. And because it had a fairly large reach for its size, people started picking up on this and gibing on it, and he would get something like three thousand letters a week, and based on these letters, he would diagnose people on his show The Medical Question Box. Right. Sorry, I was just thinking about Stephen Root in that movie out Over the top of his performance. Yeah, that's pretty good everything, okay, man,

it was really great. Yeah. So he would have his medical question box segment and put a pin in this one too, because he would literally diagnose people on the air, had a network of pharmacists across the country where he would say, go to you know, if you're in Chicago, whatever, go to this doctor and get this drug or this tonic or whatever and start using it. Yep. And he would get a cut from it because it was his

patent medicine. And then the pharmacists would charge like way more than you would for other kinds of patent medicines because it was a Brinkley patent medicine, so you could. Right. So he's getting all this attention. He's making a big name for himself. He's got infomercials in via film, a radio, and he made a little bit too big of a fuss over himself. Because as he is, his star is rising.

People start getting a little smarter about medicine. The AMA starts to sort of crack down a little more on quackery, and things are getting a little more legitimized. Right at the time, this super illegit him at doctor has his star rising, and in nineteen twenty three there were investigations into not just his college but all the kind of eclectic medical colleges. And he even was like they tried

to arrest him for practicing medicine at one point. Yeah, when he went to California to treat Harry Chandler, the owner of the La Times. Afterwards, California tried to get him. So, like he had the medical establishment, He had this this guy named Morris Fishbeine, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was still very young at the time, beating the drum to like, like, go get

that guy. This guy is a quack. He's making tons of money off these really risky procedures that don't do anything. And so he had like everybody who had anything to do with the medical establishment now was after him. Basically, Yeah, I got the idea from this and other research that Fishbeine. I don't think he was consumed with Brinkley, but I think he really had it out for him as this top quack he was making tons of money. I think he really wanted to take him down. He really did.

He wrote an editorial in nineteen thirty and he described Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort, and he used his radio station to victimize people and to enrich himself. Yeah, and so they basically, the Kansas Medical Board had no choice but to go after him because the Journal of the American Medical Association is saying this guy is a prominent quack practicing in Kansas. So Kansas had to do something.

So apparently, in nineteen thirty they sent a contingency from the Kansas Medical Board to watch him perform a couple of surgeries, and Brinkley went along with it. He performed two surgeries for them. One of them later remarked that his surgical techniques were excellent, where his skills were excellent. And then they went back to Kansas City and the next day they revoked his medical license after seeing him perform two surgeries. Yeah, they're like, you were a clearly

skilled surgeon who is out of his mind. Right, And I watched this nineteen eighty six PBS documentary on him, and in it they have many interviewed his wife, who is totally in on this as much as he is, and she was recounting that story where they went back to Kansas City. The next day and they revoked his license, and she was telling the story and kind of like a homespun country heck kind of way, you know, But she just thought it was pretty funny. That was that

was my country laugh that I just did. And so like she was completely in on it. She was not at all like being duped herself. She was she was totally in on this whole act. Yeah, so they that hospital stays open in Milford. Even though his licenses were revoked. He had colleagues that were still doing the surgeries. He was getting his cut. Eventually, what's going to happen, of course, is some of those colleagues going to be like, well, why am I I know how to do this thing? Now?

Why am I paying this guy part of my money? I'm gonna go open up my own shop. And that's what om Owensby did. He went one hundred miles away in wrote Rosalia, Kansas and said I'm gonna do it for six hundred bucks. And so Brinkley said, oh, yeah, I'm going to open up a sanatorium across the street from your place, and I'm just going to start injecting people with a secret serum that says does the same thing as a surgery, and I'm gonna do it for two hundred bucks. Yes, And so Owensby is a good

example of what he would do. He would alienate his colleagues because he would do things like bite their ear off when they tried to keep him from stabbing a patient. He would he went on huge drinking binges, and they would keep practicing while ruinously drunk, and would try to kill people. He pulled a gun on some of his early patients in Milford to force them to pay a medical bill. He chased somebody else, another patient out of

the hospital with a knife. So he had a terrible reputation for violence, especially locally and among some of the colleagues that he worked with. So it's not really surprised that anybody went off and like did their own their own chicanery themselves to kind of compete with him. Yeah, so what happens, of course, as Brinkley says here, I am. I'm a successful, wealthy carnival barker and charlatan who is as good at duping people and who has all these

questionable ideas about modern medicine. And so I'm going to get into politics and run for governor because I think people will buy what I'm laying down and we'll take a break and tell you how that went. Right after this stuff, you should know, okay, Chuck, So if you're not practicing quack medicine, you should just get into politics. It's virtually the same thing, right, sure, So not to get political or anything, but um so he ran for

governor in nineteen thirty. And remember this guy is famous nationwide, if not internationally, and he actually he was a write in candidate, so he if you he was a bad guy,

but he had good politics. He ran on something that you could call proto New Deal platform, which he called sympathy for the masses, which was good pay for workers, pensions for people who like social security, basically free medical care for the poor and indigent, and like, it was not a bad platform at all, especially coming from a really bad guy. So it's almost like he he was

a true believer in his own Paul politics. I think I don't know that he was necessarily doing it to fleece the masses, although I'm sure he would have when he became governor. But he was running at a time where again people distrusted the people in charge, whether it was the experts at the AMA or the people who had been running Kansas and then Washington, and he was running as this everyman who who was not an expert, hated experts just as much as the rest of you,

had no experience, but was still a great leader. And so he got voted for. I think he got something like one hundred and eighty three thousand votes out of six hundred thousand. He came in third as a writing candidate. Yeah, And apparently the writing part was a little hinky in that the Kansas Attorney General didn't like him and made it such where if the vote were to count, it had to be written exactly as follows, capital J period, capital R period, Brinkley, and if he wrote even I

get the idea even if you just wrote JR. Without the periods, Yeah, that it wouldn't count. So people look back and say, he may have even gotten another fifty thousand votes that didn't count for him. Yet he did not contest the election results, which is kind of surprising, and even ran again in nineteen thirty two, again coming in third place. And that's where it seems like his political career kind of wound up. Yeah, he said forget

it after that, So he lost his medical license. Remember, the Kansas Medical Board said you're you're done with this and because of his use of his radio station is diagnosing people over the airwaves, just based on letters they wrote to him. The Federal Radio Commission, the predecessor to the FCC, said you don't have a radio license any longer either. KFKB is no longer on the error. So he did something that it was kind of a trend

around this time in the late twenties early thirties. He decamped to Mexico, just across the Rio Grand from Texas and set up what were what was called the border buster radio station, which was so powerful that it would overwhelm local radio stations using the same frequency in other parts of the country. It was that it was like the loudest shout a radio station could do. And as a matter of fact, xcr A, which it was the radio station he founded, was for a time the most

powerful radio station in the entire world. Yeah, it was. By nineteen thirty eight. It was a five hundred thousand watch broadcast signal. And if you've got one hundred thousand WAT radio station like that's I don't know, all the exact numbers, but that's that's a big market radio station wattage. These days, right, the biggest most powerful radio station in the world right now is four hundred and fifty thousand watts,

So that's that's less. Yes, it's a huge outlier. It's some shy in eight hundreds is a religious station from bon Air in the Caribbean. Interesting, but I saw Chuck that UM they could actually boost XCRA to one million watts from one point. So it was just crazy powerful and potent. And he was using this to to not just further his own UM agenda, but he also helped country music, not just him, but some other like radio stations around the country that were kind of rogue radio stations.

UM they would put what they called hillbilly music on and would um would It kind of gave country music like a foothole in the United States at the time. Yeah, because radio, you know, like the radio of the East basically, UM was a little more sophisticated. You know, they're playing like jazz and like the you know, the the whatever, you know, town singers and the choirs and things like

that in the symphony. But he started playing country music and was able to sort of break bands like a you know, like a regular radio DJ would This quack doctor who moved to Mexico to broadcast his medical quackery all of a sudden is like one of the first I guess DJs for lack of a better word, to play things like the Carter Family. Right, So he actually stayed in Texas, right across the border from Acunia, Mexico, where his radio station was, and he set up shop again.

He's like, well, Kansas said I couldn't practice medicine, but Texas hasn't said that yet. And you said that he kind of he dropped the goat gland procedure. He did. He replaced it with something else he called formula ten twenty and rather than increased shady at all. No, no, I looked it up today. Formula ten twenty refers to a mosquito spray, a pressure washer concentrate for a solution for circulating cooling water. Yeah, not the kind of stuff

you'd want injected into you. And he sold it for one hundred bucks for the six shot course that you needed. And this was not for sexual virility. This was to treat prostate glance, which I remember that was his first specialty. He kind of came back full circle and started focusing on the prostate instead of sexual virility. And that was the first pillar of his downfall. He moved from sexual

virility to the prostate. Just keep that in mind. Yeah, And the reason why that was his first downfall was because his old nemesis, Fishbine gets wind that Brinkley's career is kicked back in in Texas and said, well, you know what, the problem that I had with the previous operation was I couldn't get the enough men to come forward because they were embarrassed that they got this operation

to begin with. So I didn't have this roster of people that were like wanted to sue him maybe into oblivion in But now that he's working on something less embarrassing, I do have people that'll come forward. Yes. By this time, I think in nineteen thirty eight, Brinkley had moved from Texas to Arkansas. Apparently he'd get medicaled up pretty easily in Arkansas at the time, and fish Mind published an article in the AMA magazine and what is it Hygia? Yeah,

it's a terrible name. It's a terrible name, where he again was denouncing Brinkley. Brinkley sued for libel, and that was a big mistake because at this trial he had to, like under oath, basically admit that the goat gland surgery was bunk. That was suing Fishbeine was the second pillar to his downfall, and like, that was such a bad move.

And I don't know if he felt either indignant and lost his head about it, I think, or he felt like he had to defend himself or else he was basically tacitly agreeing that he was a charlatan or quack. I don't know, sort of the hubris of their wealthy too. You know, I could see that because again he's got a quarter of a billion dollars at the time. I could see him just thinking that he's unlike anyone else.

So yeah, it probably was hubris. So on the stand he admitted that, yes, he knew that the goat clanned operation didn't work. And he lost that case and he took it to the Court of Appeals and the appellate court said this quote he was indeed a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well understood meaning of those words, like you well know what that means. So Therefore, Fishbine could not have been engaged in libel because the court found that he actually was a quack, He actually was

a charlatan. So now not only was the editor of the journal of the American Medical Association saying he was a quack, an appellate court in I think Texas said the same thing. So he fell pretty hard, pretty quickly from that moment on he did. Now, this opened him up for malpractice suits. I believe three million bucks and

damages back then as about sixty plus million today. He had his radio station still until the Mexican government came along and confiscated XCRA again for you know, just radio malpractice, I guess. And he started to suffer health problems when he lost our radio station. That was a big emotional blow to him. He suffered what's called a coronary occlusion, big time heart trouble. He didn't rest like the real doctor said he should. He got a blood clot that

went to his leg. That leg was amputated, and then his family fell into bankruptcy in the nineteen forties, right, Yeah, from all the lawsuits that he was having to defend them pay off. Then finally in Little Rock, Arkansas, a grand jury indicted him from mail fraud along with many and then six other members of his medical practice, and he never made it to trial. He died before it could come to trial. He died on twenty six, nineteen forty two, So he's never actually convicted of anything as

far as I can tell. He just lost a civil case and then was definitely about to be convicted of mail fraud, but he died before he could be Yeah, what is that fifty seven years old? Yeah? Not that not that old, Yeah, not that old. And that is uh yeah, that's John Brinkley story. Yep. Could be a movie, but I feel like movies like this don't do well. So they didn't even make him anymore. Noo. He's not at all sympathetic, and if you made him sympathetic, you

would be using a lot of license. Well, I think it might have to be told through the lens of fishbine. Oh I guess so, I guess so sure? The dogged Pursuer of Truth Yeah, played by Sam Rockwell. Yeah, although Brockwell seems like he could have been Brinkley. Oh he could do either one. Why don't you just make him both? Pay him one pay one salary to hard. Yes. Okay, Well, since we came up with the great um structure to a movie on this, I say it's time for a

listener man. All right, hey guys, a longtime listener. I recently moved to Nashville for work, so I was excited when the Grand ol Opry episode came out. This is an old one. Attended my first show at the Rieman just a few weeks ago and really enjoyed the episode. But I got a promotional email from the Riemen with a feature called celebrating the Women of the Rieman's History, and I want to tell you about Lula sed Naff, who was responsible for bringing the Grand ol Opry to

the Rheman Theater. She was definitely making her own way in a man's world, often going by lc Naff, and her gargantuan contributions to the music scene in Nashville seemed to be all but forgotten. She was working as a bookkeeper for an agency that booked performances at the Riemen. When the agency dissolved. The widow Lula needed a way to continue to provide for a daughter an aging mother, so she convinced the Rieman's board to let her rent

the space and put on the events. Lula recalled herself an unreconstructed rebel and was known for being difficult, but the Rieman's Museum curator says she got the building out of debt, brought a powerful variety to the building state, and defended the public's right to see whatever entertainment they desired. When she challenged the Board of sensors attempt to block a performance, it seemed like a real rock star and that is great additional information from Katie. Thanks a lot,

Katie appreciate that. We definitely I don't recall her name at all, do you. I don't think so, But Lula sounds like she might deserve her own episode or a movie starring Sam Rockwell that's right. Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Katie, right, yep, did you can email us? Thanks by the way, Katie at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff You Should

Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows