Medical History: Vigor, Vitality and Billy Goats

Dr. John R. Brinkley

Around 820 A.D., the Chinese emperor Li Chun, hoping to restore his virility, downed a potion cooked up by his alchemists, a combination of mercury, lead and arsenic. The elixir drove him mad and he was assassinated by courtiers. Down the ages, the quest by men to revive their pep and stiffen their moxie has rarely abated. Consider the case of John R. Brinkley.

Born a poor boy in North Carolina in 1885, Brinkley hit the medicine show circuit, performing theatrical skits and selling bottles of all-purpose tonic. Early in the new century, he and a partner set up in a town in South Carolina and advertised: “Are You a Manly Man Full of Vigor?” They offered consultations for a hefty $25 fee and administered customers injections of colored water, which they called “electric medicine.” After papering the town with bad checks, they moved on.

Seeing potential in the grift, Brinkley studied at a college that specialized in “eclectic medicine.” He didn’t finish the course, but purchased a diploma anyway. It gained him a license to practice medicine in eight states.

In 1917, Brinkley and his wife, Minnie, settled in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He doctored, she served as a midwife. But Brinkley knew that helping men restore potency was the most sure-fire of medical moneymakers. While working in a meat-packing plant, he had noticed in male goats an urge to copulate even in the shadow of the abattoir. It gave him ideas.

Brinkley’s method was to bring a patient and a young ram into the operating room and lay each on a table. He removed the testicles from the goat and implanted them through an incision in the patient’s scrotum. A shot of Mercurochrome and a few sutures completed the job. Testimonials from satisfied customers poured in. “A man is as old as his glands,” Brinkley asserted.

The birth of a baby boy to the wife of one of his early patients helped jump-start the business. Within a year, Brinkley had established an institute of health, a research lab, and a school for training nurses. He didn’t offer guarantees—his method, he said, was only 95 percent successful.

During the 1920s, gland therapy was the rage. Dr. Serge Voronoff used monkey testicles to accomplish the trick. Vienna practitioner Dr. Eugen Steinach employed a simpler procedure, a modified vasectomy, to rev up the engine. And it wasn’t just bumpkins who swore by the results. Brinkley performed the goat gland implant on the chancellor of the University of Chicago Law School. The patient declared he felt “twenty-five years younger.”

In 1923, Brinkley latched on to another innovation—radio. Broadcasting from Milford on station KFKB, he talked up his surgical wizardry, rambled about his childhood, and offered interludes of entertainment featuring fiddlers, accordion players, and harmony singers.

Relentless advertising turned Brinkley’s Milford clinic into a mecca of rejuvenation. He performed fifty operations a month at $750 a pop (more than $13,000 in today’s dollars). He let patients choose their donor goat from a pen. The ultra-rich could spend $5,000 and receive human testicles obtained from executed criminals. Brinkley spread the wealth, footing the bill for a new post office, sidewalks and sewers in the town and backing a Little League team, the Milford Goats.

Not everyone was sold on Brinkley’s cures. Morris Fishbein, an investigator for the American Medical Association, led a campaign to shut down the doctor’s operation. In 1930, the Kansas State Medical Board took up the case and found that at least forty-two of Brinkley’s patients had died as a result of his surgeries. They revoked his medical license. He lost his radio station as well. “The superquack of Milford is finished,” a Kansas City newspaper declared.

Not so fast. Brinkley moved his business to Del Rio, Texas, and established a new station just over the border. With his signal boosted from 5,000 to 500,000 watts, his message reached all forty-eight states and sometimes could be heard in Alaska. Business boomed. During the Depression year 1937 he took in $1 million ($20 million today).

In 1939, the doctor made the mistake of suing Morris Fishbein for libel. Now a jury would decide between Brinkley, whom Time magazine called the nation’s “most widely maligned, and perhaps most influential medico,” and the medical establishment. After hearing the evidence, jurors ruled in favor of Fishbein and said that Brinkley “should be considered a charlatan and quack.”

The verdict unleashed a tsunami of lawsuits against the doctor, as well as charges of mail fraud. By 1941, Brinkley was bankrupt. His health failed. Unable to restore his own youth, he died a year later at the age of sixty-seven.

If we’re tempted to pity the gullibility of Brinkley’s patients, perhaps we should keep in mind that, during the recent pandemic, some Americans avoided vaccines and embraced cures ranging from hydroxychloroquine and colloidal silver to horse deworming pills.

One byproduct of Dr. Brinkley’s career was to boost a new genre of music. Hillbilly performers, shunned by more sophisticated radio stations stateside, flocked to the doctor’s “border blaster” broadcasts. Founders of the coming boom in country and western like Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, and the Carter family, all had their voices magnified between the homilies of a man whom a newspaper reporter called the “loquacious purveyor of goat giblets.”