Customer Reviews

Charlatan: The Fraudulent Life of John Brinkley

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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.

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.

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.

The first group elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame might never have made it out of the backwoods had it not been for a serial killer.

If you find that statement intriguing, get ready for an enlightening, disturbing and thoroughly enjoyable romp through the Land of Flimflam, emceed by writer Pope Brock, author of INDIANA GOTHIC. In CHARLATAN he forensically disinters the remains of a portion of America's past that we might wish to disavow --- the heyday of the quack.

Arguably, it is a phenomenon that has never completely faded, because as long as there are gullible people there will be medical quackery, no matter how cleverly disguised as --- and these are Brock's designations --- "bogus cancer and weight-loss treatments, biological dentistry, ear candling (putting a candle in your ear), Wild Yam Cream, chelation therapy" etc. But in the early part of the 20th century, shameless shamanism reached its zenith in the nefarious person of mad genius John R. Brinkley, generally known as "Doctor" Brinkley --- though no one ever had less right to that title.

Brinkley was a product of the hardscrabble hills of North Carolina who got his start selling "patent remedies" but soon graduated to far more sophisticated forms of chicanery, in the grip of a brilliant entrepreneurial mentality gone horribly askew. He became known as "the goat gland doctor" after he and his wife Minnie developed a "technique" for grafting animal testicles onto human ones. Every time he had to demonstrate or defend this notorious surgery for conventional medical people, he lost his license to practice medicine. One official tally of deaths from Brinkley's tampering is 42 in one state, and because he moved from state to state to avoid legal prosecution, the actual total is undoubtedly much higher and does not take into account the many people whom he permanently maimed. He was known to collect his fees at gunpoint. The patients who survived, men who had come to him to revitalize their flagging sexual energies, were understandably ashamed of their obvious stupidity in paying a small fortune for the botched results. Few had the courage to testify against the wily Brinkley.

One man, however, was determined to destroy the goat gland man: the celebrated "quackbuster" Morris Fishbein. A legitimate med school graduate, Fishbein worked for the Journal of the American Medical Association, and in that position he gradually took upon himself the mantle of nemesis to people like Brinkley and others of his ilk. As Brock puts it, "Fishbein plied his harpoon in many waters, but Brinkley was his Moby Dick." Fishbein had as large an ego as his antagonist, which made him as annoying to some as the bombastic Brinkley himself. But the quackbuster's pioneering work led to the establishment of genuine standards of credentialing for medical personnel in America.

Hounded from pillar to post, Brinkley was arguably the first businessman to understand the economic payoff of mass mailings and radio ads. When his enterprises were shut down in the U.S., he bankrolled huge "border blasters," radio shows emanating from Mexico that featured live hillbilly music while touting everything from goat gland surgery to the wild claims of mindreaders, psychics, teleporters, yogis and hot women with dirty minds. He lost battle after battle with authorities on both sides of the border, but always found a way to resuscitate his schemes and collect his revenues --- sometimes just a dollar at a time --- and maintain Minnie and his son Johnny Boy in an opulent mansion in Del Rio, Texas.

It was during this phase of Brinkley's crazy-quilt career that he encountered the now-legendary Carter Family, on the skids in Tennessee and willing to come to Del Rio on the promise of a weekly salary. They and many other musical wannabes of later stellar accomplishment --- Johnny Cash, Patsy Montana, Gene Autry, Red Foley and Jimmie Rodgers --- gladly pedaled their talents to promote and increase the fortunes of the infamous surgeon.

It was when Brinkley began to defend the burgeoning Nazi party in pre-war Germany that his dark star fell precipitously. He was bankrupt but not defeated when he passed away in his sleep in 1942, eluding multiple prosecutions that threatened him and the grieving Minnie. Much of their legend would have disappeared forever had it not been re-examined in this wide-sweeping, fact-rich chronicle.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

If you like historical fiction/non-fiction, if you liked Heyday or The Great Train Robbery, or any one of a number of similar books, then you will likely be pleased by Charlatan. Most pleasing, I thought, were the copious references provided at the end. The selected bibliography was very good, indeed.

This is, without question, the best book I read this year, perhaps in the last few years. The story of a Kansas doctor in the 1920s who performed hundreds of surgeries to implant goat "glands" in men who were feeling impotent. The operation was a farce, but few people truly questioned it and he made millions from it. His operation eventually expanded into medical diagnoses issued over the radio and prescriptions for overpriced sugar pills.

But this is also the story of the man who tried to bring the charlatan down. The man who nearly ruined his own career to end that of another. For a nation who is still obsessed with "alternative" treatment of ailments or disorders, this book is a keen reminder that not everyone who offers a "solution" is in business to help you.

This book is very well written and the story is so fascinating that I'm sure anyone who would pick it up would enjoy it.

I got this book after seeing the author on C-SPAN II's "About Books", and as an amateur medical historian, decided to purchase it when the library didn't have it. It seems that all the factors came together to make John Brinkley a rich and famous (and later broken) man, and that he introduced the Western Hemisphere to some fabulous music didn't hurt his cause either.

I was completely surprised to read that the respected surgeon Max Thorek, who now has a hospital in Chicago named after him, was a participant in this scam! But unlike Brinkley, he knew what he was doing, surgically, and abandoned this project when it proved worse than useless.

His wife's story appears to be at least as interesting as his, too.

This book is a fantasticly written story about a part of American history that is a common thread to us all, yet few know about it. Brock's mastry of the written word and clever phrase makes this book a delightful read!

This is the most enjoyable book I have read in a long while. It reads like a page turning novel and yet it is history and includes the beginnings of the modern AMA, why Viagra is advertized during the dinner hour on TV, talk-radio and politics, hearing it on the "X" and so much more. Why alternative medicine can be so "true" to to so many, why rational arguments about medicine, health, and polictics may never be really made.

I ordered two as gifts for a couple of doctor friends and have led my copy to a few others.

True Crime at its most beguiling and horrifying.
In the pre-Viagra Jazz Age, in Kansas, lived and thrived a "virility racket" (Dr. John Brinkley and his goat testicle transplants) to make PT Barnum proud - until the "calvary" aka the fledgling American Medical Association, rode into town and shut him and his magnificently malevolent malpractice down.
I loved Pope Brock's Indiana Gothic and he's come again with another brilliant chronicle of the human condition, like this nugget:'he had always known that for an operator with big dreams,the percentage of people with cancer, for example, is discouragingly small; but a working driveshaft is as fundamental as sunshine.'
This book is fundamental for True Crime addicts, historians, and doctors with a sense of history and humor.
/TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer