Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Kindle Edition)

by Pope Brock (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
John Brinkley, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina but attended Rush Medical College in Chicago, got his start touring as a medicine man hawking miracle tonics and became famous for transplanting goat testicles into impotent men. Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923, hustling his pseudoscience over the airwaves and giving an outlet to astrologers and country music. His nemesis was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the buoyant, compulsively curious editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association whose luminary friends included Sinclair Lewis, Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken. Fishbein took aim at Brinkley in JAMA, lay publications and pamphlets distributed by the thousands. Even after the Kansas State Medical Board yanked his medical license in 1930, Brinkley ran twice for governor of Kansas and almost won. Finally, Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel and lost in a spectacular showdown. Brock (Indiana Gothic) did tremendous research on this rollicking story, but the result is at times unfocused, overwritten and digressive, borrowing just a little too much from the overblown rhetoric of its subject. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

One day in the fall of 1917, a Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, 46 years of age, showed up at the clinic that had recently been opened in the hamlet of Milford by a medical quack named John R. Brinkley. "His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation," Pope Brock writes in this hugely amusing if somewhat sobering book, "any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel." Stittsworth reluctantly admitted that he was suffering the condition for which Viagra is now prescribed. As Brinkley tried to dream up a solution, the farmer looked wistfully out the window, "pondering the livestock," and said: "Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts."

Precisely what happened thereafter "is in dispute," but two nights later Stittsworth returned to the clinic, "climbed onto the operating table," and awaited Brinkley. "Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic," and Brinkley was on his way. Two weeks later Stittsworth "reappeared with a smile on his face." As he told other farmers about his good fortune, men -- and then women -- began to queue up for injections of billy goat magic, with the result that Brinkley soon "became a pioneer in gland transplants" at exactly the moment when America was ready for them.

Brock says, accurately, that "there has probably never been a more quack-prone and quack-infested country than the United States," and the period between the two world wars -- the years when Texas Guinan welcomed customers to her New York speakeasy with the gleeful cry, "Hello, suckers!" -- turned out to be a high-water mark of quackery, as the widespread longing for health and eternal youth coincided with the age of science: "Mankind had found wisdom at last. Science! Technology! These were the new church. Adam was out, apes were in. Rationality ruled. Rationality had made the airplane possible, and instant coffee. Few realized that it also made possible the golden age of quacks." Brock continues:

"In this dizzy world of wonders anything was possible, and it all conspired to make the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad. One measure of the scientific gullibility of the age is the number of mythical animals that were now positively declared to exist. During this period between the world wars, sightings were reported and searches launched for, among others, the snoligostus, the ogopogo, the Australian bunyip, the whirling wimpus, the rubberado, the rackabore, and the cross-feathered snee. . . . Advances in medicine and hygiene had already increased the average lifetime from forty-one years in 1870 to more than fifty-five by the early 1920s. Now the sky was the limit -- biblical life spans, some researchers said, could become a reality -- all thanks to the homely gonad and the brave new science of endocrinology."

John R. Brinkley was just the man to seize the day. A farm boy from the North Carolina mountains, he had found his way into quackery by the time he reached his 20s, and though a brief flirtation with "electric medicine from Germany" -- "injecting colored water into rear ends" -- got him into jail in South Carolina in 1913, he just headed west and bounced right back. He had an "uncanny grasp of psychology, both mass and individual," and he "understood that the relationship between a man and a woman is often less fraught than that between man and member." He was a strange guy, "a sort of down-home egghead, crisply confident and alert to a thousand details," who occasionally "got liquored up" and turned briefly violent, but he could turn on the blarney and the charm as fast as you please.

The people of Milford thought he was the Second Coming. The astonishing success of his clinic, which by 1918 was a 16-room operation called the Brinkley Institute of Health, brought a great wave of prosperity to this dreary little crossroads. He was way ahead of his time, using advertising and radio and anything else he could exploit to spread the word about the magic he could perform. In 1929 he dreamed up something called Medical Question Box, in which listeners to his radio station could send in their health grievances: "Brinkley would read some of the letters, diagnose each case, and suggest treatment -- all on the radio." He told them what drugs to buy from pharmacists who were in on the scam: "The pharmacists kicked back one dollar to Brinkley on each jar sold (at about six times normal retail) and kept the rest."

Of course he had enemies, the most influential and determined of whom was Morris Fishbein. He was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which at the time was far short of the prestige it enjoys today, but it gave him a platform sufficiently visible for him to become "the great quack buster of his day, and later the hellhound on Brinkley's trail." The first time word reached him about Brinkley's antics, Fishbein turned his attention to "the greatest cause of his career: the professional extermination of John Brinkley, M.D.," but it took him a long time to bring that off, and Brinkley didn't go down without one hell of a fight.

Brinkley was like a Shmoo, the round-bottomed inflatable toy of my youth. Bop it this way or that, it always rolled right back with a big smile on its silly face. You couldn't keep John Brinkley down, at least not for long. In 1922 when he went to Los Angeles, "the most quack-intensive town in the nation," he found a "vast sucker pool" and aimed to cash in on it by building a 36-room hospital at immense expense, but then the California medical board "found his résumé riddled with lies and discrepancies" and denied him a license. Never mind. He simply went back to Milford, telling his wife, "The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce," and expanded his operation there. An advertisement said, "It is modern throughout, private rooms with bath, and the latest and most modern equipment, telephone in every room, private rooms, reading rooms, lounging rooms, large spacious lobby and dining room, modern drug store and barber shop."

His radio station in Milford, KFKB, was determined by Radio Digest in 1930 to be "the most popular radio station in the United States." That same year he lost his medical license, so he decided to run for governor of Kansas as a write-in independent. He almost certainly would have won had not the rules been switched at the last minute, eliminating as many as 50,000 of his votes on specious grounds. Never mind. He bounced right back and went to Mexico, where he set up a radio operation that by 1932 was up to an astonishing 1 million watts, making it "far and away the most powerful on the planet," so powerful that "on clear nights Brinkley reached Alaska, skipped across to Finland, was picked up by ships on the Java Sea. In later years Russian spies reportedly used the station to help them learn English."

The programming on Brinkley's Mexican station wasn't just pitches for health schemes and the extreme right-wing views to which he had become susceptible. In order to attract and keep listeners, he brought in country and Tex-Mex musicians; among those tuning in were the young Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and others who eventually became famous and influential country musicians themselves. Stations that broadcast into the United States from Mexico were known as "border busters," and Brinkley's XERA was the biggest of all, inadvertently leading the way to the "full-scale cultural upheaval" that country music brought about.

That was a nice side product, but it couldn't distract attention from the mounting numbers of Brinkley's patients who died in or after leaving his clinic. In 1930 the Kansas City Star "published the names of five people who had expired at Brinkley's hospital since the fall of 1928" -- "His signature was on their death certificates" -- and his license was revoked that same year after it was shown that 42 people, "some of whom weren't ill when they arrived, had died either by his own hand or under his supervision." His final numbers are unknown, but they are high; "though perhaps not the worst serial killer in American history, ranked by body count he is at least a finalist for the crown."

This, needless to say, is where Pope Brock's tale turns dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance. These are aspects of human nature that just don't go away; even today, in the age of supposed medical enlightenment and sophistication, "rejuvenation is a global bazaar of infomercials and Web addresses, tools and toys for every need." John R. Brinkley may be long dead (since 1942), but his heirs in quackery continue to flourish.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1302 KB
• Print Length: 336 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (February 5, 2008)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0013SSPVE
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #30,738 in Kindle Store (See Bestsellers in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the huckster and the hellhound, February 9, 2008

By	David W. Straight (knoxville, tennessee United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Hardcover)

Charlatan is a thoroughly enjoyable (and pertinent even today!) tale of medical quackery a man who spent years battling against the country's leading quack. The self-style "Doctor" Brinkley had no formal medical training and purchased his degrees. He started selling patent medicine for sexual problems (and other ailments) but soon found his niche. About 1919 he began transplanting goat testicles in men: $750 a pop. That's $750 back then, and no credit given. But you did get to visit the goat pen behind the clinic in Kansas to pick out a young billygoat of your choice.

By today's standards, the operations were eye-popping in terms of the lack of attention to asepsis/antisepsis. Gangrene and lockjaw were among the perils one too often faced. Brinkley got very rich, and very famous: he twice ran for governor of Kansas and was narrowly defeated both times. When the Kansas Medical Board came down hard on him (at last), Brinkley moved to Del Rio, Texas, and set up the most powerful radio station in the world just across the border. This staion was used to broadcast the program Medical Question Box which would answer questions for a fee and which promoted quack medicine available through mail order. Pulling in a million dollars a year (in 1930s dollars, not 2008 dollars) was no mean feat.

Nemesis, in the form of Dr Morris Fishbein, finally proved to be Brinkley's undoing. Fishbein spent his life fighting and exposing medical quackery, and regularly wrote articles for the JAMA. It took Fishbein 10 years to bring down Brinkley: the climax of the book is a magnificently described court case where Brinkley was a disaster on the stand. The author notes that Fishbein sometimes was overzealous in his pursuit of what he considered quackery--occasionally going after what are respectable areas of medicine nowadays. But even so, this is not a tale about an Inspector Javert pursuing Jean Valjean. Justice does triumph in the end, more or less.

This is a wonderfully written book about quackery, gullibility, money, politics, and the appetite of the public for medical cures. We can look back at the 1920's and 30's with relief that we're better off because of the diligence of the Fishbeins. But at the same time "alternative" medical treatments abound nowadays. You can go into almost any large drugstore chain and buy water labelled as medicine for earaches and the like (which is probably harmless but not helpful) and herbal products which can kill you. Quackery lives on. Ou sont les Fishbeins d'antan? to mangle a famous line. Brock's book reads like a good mystery, with well-drawn characters, a great storyline, a climactic trial, and some lessons for today. You'll enjoy this.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky quackery, February 5, 2008

By	Dean Kahn (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Hardcover)

I couldn't put this book down, and couldn't stop from telling other people about it.

I don't want to give away too many details, but it was amazing, fun, and yet sad, to learn that an American in the 20th century could earn millions, win popular acclaim, hobnob with the rich and famous, and nearly win election as a governor - all because people believed that, er, goat glands could bring them renewed life and, er, virility.

There are many other odd twists to the story, from popular music to media history to the rise of the American Medical Association.

It's an oddball slice of history told with the wry wit the story deserves.

This book will rejuvenate your reading.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hilarious and Scary Goat Gland Hoax, February 19, 2008

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Hardcover)

Everybody knows Viagra nowadays, and what it treats. Eighty years ago, everyone knew of the "goat gland" treatment, which not only treated what Viagra treats, but also brought a general rejuvenation to men, eliminated flab, advanced previously receding hairlines, and provided other miraculous cures. Provided cures, that is, to the gullible. The goat gland treatment never worked, despite its fame, and unlike the talismans that men have used for millennia to restore vigor, it had serious, sometimes lethal side effects. That little drawback did not impair the career of Doctor (perhaps that should be "Doctor") John R. Brinkley, one of the most famous of names in America in the 1930s. His astonishing rise and fall story is told with wry good humor in _Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam_ (Crown Publishers) by Pope Brock. Brinkley is gone, and Brock does not harp on lessons we might learn from his enterprise, but it is clear that although we don't do goat glands anymore, the golden age for medical hucksterism has never entered its twilight.

Brinkley was a farm boy who fiddled with "electric medicine" and injecting colored water into the buttocks of patients, which got him jailed in South Carolina in 1913 for practicing without a license. Once sprung, he headed to Chicago, and in 1915 he paid $150 for a degree from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, and he was in business. He set up a clinic in Milford, Kansas, and began implanting goat testicles into men who had lost their pep. He became a pioneer in radio advertising, and also in broadcasting country music. He became a right-wing demagogue on the radio, ranting against communism and at least initially giving tacit approval to Nazism, and giving Sunday sermons comparing the torments that Jesus suffered from the Philistines to those he himself suffered from the American Medical Association. He drove himself into a collision with the AMA when he started advertising. His nemesis at the AMA was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the editor of the _Journal of the AMA_, a platform from which he became a quack-buster, with special concentration on ending Brinkley's career. Fishbein was accused of merely upholding AMA's line of promoting the activities only of AMA-approved doctors and their AMA-approved techniques, but he genuinely cared about the people who had been hurt by Brinkley's surgeries or mail-order scams. It took a long time, more than two decades during which Fishbein tracked Brinkley's activities from Kansas to Texas to Arkansas.

As Brock describes him, Brinkley was a resourceful villain who until the end stayed one step ahead of his enemies and made millions, owning three yachts and countless cars. Brock gives evidence that Brinkley was not deluding himself, but knew he was making gain from defrauding his clients. His ability at self promotion and in fooling others is often funny, and often this is a hilarious book describing Brinkley's folly and that of his patients. Reading about the body count, however, or about the patients whose lives were ruined as the money rolled into Brinkley's accounts, is not funny. It may be that medical con artists nowadays aren't doing surgery, but television and internet advertisement is still touting pills and gadgets for "male enhancement", as well as weight reduction, breast augmentation, magnetic healing, and plenty else. Each cure claims scads of satisfied customers; one of the great lessons of Brock's entertaining book is that such attestations are completely meaningless. Another great lesson is that a sucker is born every minute, and so is a charlatan ready to take his money. It's not a new lesson, or a profound one, but it is revealed here in a duel of personalities that is compelling reading.