Wondering what to get your loved ones for Christmas? My suggestion is to go full old school and buy them a sex box. Wait. Am I to understand that you don't know what a sex box is? Oh darling reader, let me take you on a journey.
It starts with a man Wilhelm Reich. You may know about him if you have seen the film "W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism", but chances are, you haven't seen it because basically no one has. Don't bother. It is really, really weird.
Anyway, he's an Austrian born in 1897, and he grew up to be a psychiatrist, but he had an interest in sex from way early on. Like, he visited brothels when he was 15. He masturbated all the time, had sex with all of his family's servants, and apparently liked to watch animals having sex. I imagine his teachers wrote the word "troubled" on a lot of his report cards. He also used to watch his mother have adulterous sex with his tutor.
So, at this point, he's off to a great start.
When he grew older, he joined the army and started studying medicine. During this point, in 1919, he met somebody that I hate with all of my being, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud was a big part of Reich's decision to go into psychotherapy, which just seems like yet another horrible thing in human history that is entirely Freud's fault. Actually, Freud let him psychoanalyze some of his patients even before he had finished medical school. Despite the fact that it's Freud (yecch!), this does bring up an interesting point. Even though Reich was unquestionably a completely weird whack-a-doodle, he didn't seem that way when you met him. Apparently, he seemed like this incredibly bright, smart guy wth a great personality. It wasn' t until you got to know him better that you realized how loony he was. This right here is why the concept of second dates exists.
He actually rented a house down the street from Freud and saw most of his patients there, once he graduated. This is where things derailed. Willy Reich started having sex with his patients. I don't know if you know this, but "Don't Fuck Your Patients" is actually inscribed in stone on the front steps of every medical school in America. Problem was, he had sex with this patient named Annie Pink and her father wasn't having any of that, so the two of them had to get married. I mean Wilhelm married Annie, not her father. Just to clarify.
Interestingly enough, Annie eventually also became a psychoanalyst and they had two kids who also became doctors. But he's still not satisfied. He developed the concept of something called "character armor". This means that you can tell a person's neuroses from the way that a person holds themselves. Like, if he looks anxious, he probably has anxiety. If you massaged them really hard with your fist and made him look less anxious, then the anxiety disorder would go away as well. Then, he has to go and mix this theory with his weird sex thing and he started opening sex clinics all around Vienna. He thought if people had more orgasms, they'd be happier (which... fair enough). Apparently, they gave out contraceptives, information on sex, and also Marxist political advice. Yeah. Very progressive stuff.
It's like how sometimes if you want to get dinner at a soup kitchen, you have to learn about Jesus. If you want to get some condoms, you gotta learn about Marx.
He believed that sex before marriage was ok. He also believed in having sex at younger ages was ok. Yikes. He was, however, overwhelmed with patients. Then, he comes up with this theory of Orgastic Potency. According to Bill Reich, the way to be mentally healthy was to lose yourself in a really great orgasm. Orgasms were the way to cure all mental problems. he was known as "The Prophet For the Better Orgasm" (which was my nickname in college).
At this point, Freud starts getting a little hesitant and sends him this letter that's like, "Are you ok? 'Cuz you sound crazy." And Reich was like "I'm fine! I'm a genius! Wheeeee!" That was the beginning of the end of their friendship.
Reich later said that the reason Freud got jaw cancer was because he had a strict Jewish upbringing and restricted his sexual desires. This was especially weird because Reich was also Jewish and didn't ever get jaw cancer. At this point, he believed that orgasms cured all your ills, so he was like, "We should let children have sex so that people can be cured of their problems even earlier." Both the Vienna Psychiatric Association and the Communist party were like "Absolutely not, dude" and kicked him out. He fled the country because of this and Hitler (peripherally).
He moved to Denmark, but the Denmark communist party was like "Don't even apply. We don't want you." He's still doing the therapy thing, just like Freud except he would ask them to undress and then touch them while they were naked. So actually nothing like Freud, I guess. Nevermind.
When he touched them, he had this weird idea that if you pressed hard enough on somebody, you could, like, squeeze an orgasm out of them like the squeaker on a rubber duck. He would just press his fist to your face until your had an orgasm. (This is a secret known only to some very select, very popular dentists.)
The International Psychiatric Association was having a meeting and they told him "Don't come. We think you're super weird and literally nobody wants you here, but Wilhelm Reich was like "Can't stop, won't stop" and camped out at the conference for the entire weekend. The only reason he wasn't kicked out like they planned was because he walked around the conference with a GIANT FUCKING KNIFE in his belt. He was kicked out of the association, though and he was pretty much in disgrace at this point.
He moved to Norway and studied biology. He came up with another theory that the body fills up with this fluid and then an orgasm causes a bio-electric discharge which drains the fluid. He tested this by having people masturbate in front of him while he measured the electrical energy around them. This did NOT help him improve his reputation, but he still had some fans in the good old U. S. of A. Bring me your poor. Bring me your hungry. Bring me your sex weirdos.
This is where the sex box first shows up. He starts this idea that there was a cosmic energy inside of all things called "orgone energy" because of course he did. I firmly believe that this is what the Tardis is flying through. Reich also had a special telescope that allowed him to see this orgone energy, called an organoscope. He wanted to be able to prove his theory right, so he built this sex box.
They were these human sized plywood boxes with a chair and sometimes a little window. They were lined with rock or sheet iron or something with a lot of layers that would easily reflect the sex energy. You would get naked and sit in these boxes and apparently that was good for you, because the orgone energy you gave off would be reflected back at you and... that's... good?..
He believed that these boxes could also cure cancer, which he tested by giving mice cancer and sticking them inside the box. Even this was wack because the way he "gave cancer to the mice" was that he had found a particle that he thought was the cancer particle, but it was really just a staff infection. So when the mice exited the box, they wouldn't have cancer because they had never had cancer in the first place. I do wonder if the box cured their staff infections, though. That would have really been something.
During this time, I shit you not, he became friends with Einstein. Einstein wasn't completely convinced about his theories, but thought he was an interesting, smart guy who had been treated unfairly because of his progressive sexual ideas. I mean, he was. But he was also nuts.
Now, he decides to send a sex box to Einstein to be like, "Help me show everybody that my sex boxes are a real thing. Come on, man. You're a scientist. Tell 'em." To his credit, Einstein tried to find some sort of beneficial use for the sex box, but he came up empty. Just know, dear readers, that Einstein, the world's brightest scientific mind, spent an entire afternoon looking for cosmic sex energy in a box. I mean, what might he have done if he hadn't wasted that afternoon staring at a box, looking for sex energy? This is why time travel doesn't exist. Damn you, Wilhelm Reich!
So Einstein writes him this letter saying "Look, man, I gave it my best shot, but I'm just not seeing anything useful i your box thing" and Reich sent him back a 32 page letter saying "You're an idiot. I'm right and you're wrong. I don't want to talk to you anymore."
Reich was now a laughingstock in basically every country around the world. At the time, he was studying children to discover where mental issues started. A lot of this involved having a naked kid stand in front of a panel of 30 researchers, so people weren't thrilled with that. After this, his career ended although he continued to come up with freaky theories. According to his later work, the evil twin of orgone energy was deadly orgone radiatio, which just makes him sound like a Silver Age Marvel comic. Apparently, it was in the atmosphere and the way to fight it was with his invention, the cloud buster. I like to think that he made the cloud busters out of old sex boxes that he just couldn't sell and this was the only way to unload them. Who's to say?
If you Google it, the pictures are fantastic and I think it works kind of like a supersoaker. According to Reich, when you had used you cloud buster to scare away the orgone radiation, rain would happen. One time, a bunch of farmers hired him to use his cloud buster to create rain, and apparently it actually did rain that night.
He was investigated by the FBI, but they apparently had the wrong Wilhelm Reich, which is somehow even weirder than if it had been him. The FDA also investigated him but that was because he was a charlatan who was selling sex boxes to people. They confiscated and destroyed all of his stuff, dismantled his sex boxes, and told him he wasn't allowed to peddle his wares anymore. They also burned his materials to drive the point home.
After that, he officially lost his mind. He started chasing UFOs, but he kept selling his stuff, which eventually landed him in jail. And that is where the tale of Wilhelm Reich ends. He died of a heart attack in jail.
Good night, sweet weirdo, and flights of succubi sing thee to thy rest.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
The History of Hysteria
This is the first in a series of posts that I'm going to put up that are about the medical history of sex and childbirth. I have a few of the others already written, but I'm hoping to post them in a sort of order. Enjoy!
The concept of hysteria is one that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. It is no longer accepted as a malady of women. The condition of hysteria as an illness dates back to 1900 BCE. They found Egyptian papyrus that documented a condition where women were being difficult and weren't behaving themselves and were becoming nervous. The reason that the scientists identified these Egyptian depictions as the same thing that the Greeks later called hysteria was that they indicated that a woman's uterus or womb was moving around inside their body. This is where the term comes from. The Greek word hysteria means womb. The idea was that as the uterus migrates around a woman's body, it causes her distress. Truthfully, a woman's actual womb does not move unless her uterus is detached or prolapsed, but this idea has persisted. Socrates upheld this belief, and Plato wrote about it, likening the uterus to a living creature that wandered around the body, usually in response to smells. He called it "An animal within an animal." According to Plato, the uterus moved towards good smells and away from bad ones, which was also a way that you could get the uterus to move back to it's original position. If the uterus was too high, then the woman could put something that smelled nice lower down and the uterus would move towards it.
So, by 2nd century Rome, this idea was still widely held and Galen, who wrote a lot of medical opinions of the time, thought that women weren't freeing themselves of their "female semen" enough. This was also why hysteria began to be known as the "widow's disease", because it was thought that intercourse could relieve hysteria, so if a woman was not married and was no longer engaging in sexual activity, then she would become hysterical. That meant that if a woman did not have a husband, the physician could take care of that problem. This was known as a pelvic massage. This idea did not take hold until much later, but this is where the idea came from. That a woman's hysteria could be cured with an orgasm or a "hysterical paroxysm". This did not mean that the doctors were having sex with their patients. This was like a pelvic exam, very sterile and professional. The woman would put her legs up and was covered in a sheet and the doctor would use his hands to bring the woman to orgasm. Although, the doctors did not know that was what they were doing because it was believed until very recently that women could only have an orgasm through heterosexual, traditional sexual intercourse.
There were conflicting opinions. Soranus, known as the father of gynecology, thought that the cure was not to have sex, but instead to have a massage, take a bath, exercise, and generally relax. The Middle Ages were a bad time for medicine. At the time, everything smelled bad, and disease was thought to be transmitted by miasma or bad air, so the solution to many diseases was to make things smell less bad. Like a suppository with some potpourri in it or a salve. This was usually what doctors recommended at the time. Hysteria could have been anything that a woman exhibited that was not considered proper behavior such as nervousness, faintness, insomnia, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, disinterest in sex, over interest in sex, loss or increase in appetite, or a tendency to cause trouble. It was a catch-all for women who weren't acting the way that they were supposed to act. It was a bucket diagnosis. It didn't really mean anything, but was instead a diagnosis that covered all of the bases that doctors couldn't figure out the actual cause of. It was probably the first psychiatric disorder documented among women, and women were considered inferior and not very complicated, so they probably only had one psychiatric problem. Thus, hysteria. There were also women who were accused of having their hysteria as a result of demonic possession and were exorcised as a cure. If the treatments didn't work, then it was probably the devil.
By the 1600s, Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon, put together that this hysterical paroxysm was probably just an orgasm. He also said that knowing this was basically useless because achieving a female orgasm is pretty much impossible and he likened it to trying to pat your tummy and rub your head at the same time. You might as well try to catch a unicorn. Thomas Sydenham ranked it the second most common disease and said that pretty much all women were going to get it at some point in their lives. If a woman had PMS or menopause or was upset about something normal or wanted to have sex or didn't want to have sex, then she was labeled hysterical. Some things that were actual disorders like anxiety probably fell into that category as well, but they weren't going to be cured with an orgasm. The Salem witch trials were probably also linked to hysteria. This persisted until the 1800s. In 1859, they began to tease out the idea that hysteria was a nervous disorder that was brought on by the pressures of modern society on fragile female continence. Pierre Briquet thought that a quarter of women had hysteria and there was a list that contained at least 75 symptoms on it, which was considered incomplete.
In young America, as more young women were diagnosed with hysteria, it was seen as a sign that the country was becoming more modern. This point was really when they pinned the problem on the idea that women were not having enough hysterical paroxysm. The number one symptoms of hysteria were said to be erotic fantasies and vaginal lubrication. It is fascinating how this concept has shaped women's role throughout history, whether it is as this wild temptress who is prone to lead men to sin or as this fragile thing that we must protect, or the way that women are using sex as a weapon. There was a female writer of the time, Tutuila Ruggerio, who wrote that, since sex was too sinful an idea for women to engage in for their own pleasure, women should just take sedatives to calm themselves down. She prescribed that women should take some mint and musk oil and take a nap to quell their sexual desires and get over it.
Starting in the 1850s, doctors got really serious about treatment. At this point, the idea that wombs were wandering was not around anymore. This is the point where the pelvic douche was invented. It was similar to a douche that women should not be using today, except it was just to direct a stream of water towards the pelvis until the woman felt better. In 1869, there was an American physician who built the first steam-powered vibrator. It was essentially a big table that the woman was strapped to that had a hole in it with a vibrating sphere that they sat on. This was not something that she would have in her home. It was a medical device only to be used at a doctor's office under the supervision of the doctor or at the very least her husband. This was still true for the 1880s version when Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the battery powered vibrator, which weighed about 40 pounds. Physicians were thrilled because up to this point, they had been causing hysterical paroxysms manually, which they found exhausting. They said that terrible task that usually took hours now only took minutes with the help of the battery powered vibrator.
Freud got involved at this point (of course he did). In the 1890s, he and another physician named Joseph Brewer came up with the idea that doctors could use talk therapy to talk women out of their hysteria. He advised bringing up their repressed memories and their sexual needs to help them. Part of the reason that he suggested this was that he apparently wasn't very good at causing hysterical paroxysms. By the 1890s it was advertised that if you didn't have enough money to afford a battery powered vibrator, then a woman could ride a horse, ride in a carriage, or "vigorously" use a rocking chair to alleviate her own symptoms. Or they could buy an electric saddle machine, which was essentially the same as one of those quarter operated play-horse machines that can be found outside of grocery stores. By the 1900s, there were all kinds of vibrators available. In fact, by some accounts, the vibrator was the 5th home appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the electric fan, the electric kettle, the toaster, and the plug-in vibrator. It beat out the vacuum and the iron by over a decade.
This whole time people are still saying that these are strictly for medical use. They advertised these machines for the whole family, although not for use in the same way. It was thought back then that any vibrations were good for people's health. Vibrators could be used to vibrate your face or your back or your arm. Vibrations were essential to a healthy life, like that machine with the belt that rubbed you and "helped you lose weight". In fact, some vibrators were marketed as weight loss machines. They were portrayed as cures for dozens of diseases, such as deafness, malaria, fatigue, and impotence. They weren't, though. None of this was real. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, the vibrator appeared in major newspaper and ads in popular magazines. They were sold in electrical shops and could be found in the Sears catalogue. By the 1920s, these machines started showing up in pornography and people started being honest about what they really were, which shoved them underground for a while. They showed back up in the 1950s, but it was a very conservative decade.
They fell out of favor and then in 1952, at long last, the American Psychological Association said definitively that hysteria was not a real disease and the term was dropped from the diagnostic catalogue. Interestingly enough, as of 2009, it is still against the law in Alabama to buy a sex toy for anything other than medical purposes. To buy one, you have to sign a waiver stating that you are going to buy and use it for medical reasons. The Hitachi company marketed its plug-in Magic Wand vibrator as a massager until 2013.
A quick note: after doctors decided that hysteria was not as a result of a wandering uterus, there were men who were diagnosed with hysteria through the years, but they were incredibly few and far between. It impacted society's view of women for centuries.
The concept of hysteria is one that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. It is no longer accepted as a malady of women. The condition of hysteria as an illness dates back to 1900 BCE. They found Egyptian papyrus that documented a condition where women were being difficult and weren't behaving themselves and were becoming nervous. The reason that the scientists identified these Egyptian depictions as the same thing that the Greeks later called hysteria was that they indicated that a woman's uterus or womb was moving around inside their body. This is where the term comes from. The Greek word hysteria means womb. The idea was that as the uterus migrates around a woman's body, it causes her distress. Truthfully, a woman's actual womb does not move unless her uterus is detached or prolapsed, but this idea has persisted. Socrates upheld this belief, and Plato wrote about it, likening the uterus to a living creature that wandered around the body, usually in response to smells. He called it "An animal within an animal." According to Plato, the uterus moved towards good smells and away from bad ones, which was also a way that you could get the uterus to move back to it's original position. If the uterus was too high, then the woman could put something that smelled nice lower down and the uterus would move towards it.
So, by 2nd century Rome, this idea was still widely held and Galen, who wrote a lot of medical opinions of the time, thought that women weren't freeing themselves of their "female semen" enough. This was also why hysteria began to be known as the "widow's disease", because it was thought that intercourse could relieve hysteria, so if a woman was not married and was no longer engaging in sexual activity, then she would become hysterical. That meant that if a woman did not have a husband, the physician could take care of that problem. This was known as a pelvic massage. This idea did not take hold until much later, but this is where the idea came from. That a woman's hysteria could be cured with an orgasm or a "hysterical paroxysm". This did not mean that the doctors were having sex with their patients. This was like a pelvic exam, very sterile and professional. The woman would put her legs up and was covered in a sheet and the doctor would use his hands to bring the woman to orgasm. Although, the doctors did not know that was what they were doing because it was believed until very recently that women could only have an orgasm through heterosexual, traditional sexual intercourse.
There were conflicting opinions. Soranus, known as the father of gynecology, thought that the cure was not to have sex, but instead to have a massage, take a bath, exercise, and generally relax. The Middle Ages were a bad time for medicine. At the time, everything smelled bad, and disease was thought to be transmitted by miasma or bad air, so the solution to many diseases was to make things smell less bad. Like a suppository with some potpourri in it or a salve. This was usually what doctors recommended at the time. Hysteria could have been anything that a woman exhibited that was not considered proper behavior such as nervousness, faintness, insomnia, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, disinterest in sex, over interest in sex, loss or increase in appetite, or a tendency to cause trouble. It was a catch-all for women who weren't acting the way that they were supposed to act. It was a bucket diagnosis. It didn't really mean anything, but was instead a diagnosis that covered all of the bases that doctors couldn't figure out the actual cause of. It was probably the first psychiatric disorder documented among women, and women were considered inferior and not very complicated, so they probably only had one psychiatric problem. Thus, hysteria. There were also women who were accused of having their hysteria as a result of demonic possession and were exorcised as a cure. If the treatments didn't work, then it was probably the devil.
By the 1600s, Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon, put together that this hysterical paroxysm was probably just an orgasm. He also said that knowing this was basically useless because achieving a female orgasm is pretty much impossible and he likened it to trying to pat your tummy and rub your head at the same time. You might as well try to catch a unicorn. Thomas Sydenham ranked it the second most common disease and said that pretty much all women were going to get it at some point in their lives. If a woman had PMS or menopause or was upset about something normal or wanted to have sex or didn't want to have sex, then she was labeled hysterical. Some things that were actual disorders like anxiety probably fell into that category as well, but they weren't going to be cured with an orgasm. The Salem witch trials were probably also linked to hysteria. This persisted until the 1800s. In 1859, they began to tease out the idea that hysteria was a nervous disorder that was brought on by the pressures of modern society on fragile female continence. Pierre Briquet thought that a quarter of women had hysteria and there was a list that contained at least 75 symptoms on it, which was considered incomplete.
In young America, as more young women were diagnosed with hysteria, it was seen as a sign that the country was becoming more modern. This point was really when they pinned the problem on the idea that women were not having enough hysterical paroxysm. The number one symptoms of hysteria were said to be erotic fantasies and vaginal lubrication. It is fascinating how this concept has shaped women's role throughout history, whether it is as this wild temptress who is prone to lead men to sin or as this fragile thing that we must protect, or the way that women are using sex as a weapon. There was a female writer of the time, Tutuila Ruggerio, who wrote that, since sex was too sinful an idea for women to engage in for their own pleasure, women should just take sedatives to calm themselves down. She prescribed that women should take some mint and musk oil and take a nap to quell their sexual desires and get over it.
Starting in the 1850s, doctors got really serious about treatment. At this point, the idea that wombs were wandering was not around anymore. This is the point where the pelvic douche was invented. It was similar to a douche that women should not be using today, except it was just to direct a stream of water towards the pelvis until the woman felt better. In 1869, there was an American physician who built the first steam-powered vibrator. It was essentially a big table that the woman was strapped to that had a hole in it with a vibrating sphere that they sat on. This was not something that she would have in her home. It was a medical device only to be used at a doctor's office under the supervision of the doctor or at the very least her husband. This was still true for the 1880s version when Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the battery powered vibrator, which weighed about 40 pounds. Physicians were thrilled because up to this point, they had been causing hysterical paroxysms manually, which they found exhausting. They said that terrible task that usually took hours now only took minutes with the help of the battery powered vibrator.
Freud got involved at this point (of course he did). In the 1890s, he and another physician named Joseph Brewer came up with the idea that doctors could use talk therapy to talk women out of their hysteria. He advised bringing up their repressed memories and their sexual needs to help them. Part of the reason that he suggested this was that he apparently wasn't very good at causing hysterical paroxysms. By the 1890s it was advertised that if you didn't have enough money to afford a battery powered vibrator, then a woman could ride a horse, ride in a carriage, or "vigorously" use a rocking chair to alleviate her own symptoms. Or they could buy an electric saddle machine, which was essentially the same as one of those quarter operated play-horse machines that can be found outside of grocery stores. By the 1900s, there were all kinds of vibrators available. In fact, by some accounts, the vibrator was the 5th home appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the electric fan, the electric kettle, the toaster, and the plug-in vibrator. It beat out the vacuum and the iron by over a decade.
This whole time people are still saying that these are strictly for medical use. They advertised these machines for the whole family, although not for use in the same way. It was thought back then that any vibrations were good for people's health. Vibrators could be used to vibrate your face or your back or your arm. Vibrations were essential to a healthy life, like that machine with the belt that rubbed you and "helped you lose weight". In fact, some vibrators were marketed as weight loss machines. They were portrayed as cures for dozens of diseases, such as deafness, malaria, fatigue, and impotence. They weren't, though. None of this was real. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, the vibrator appeared in major newspaper and ads in popular magazines. They were sold in electrical shops and could be found in the Sears catalogue. By the 1920s, these machines started showing up in pornography and people started being honest about what they really were, which shoved them underground for a while. They showed back up in the 1950s, but it was a very conservative decade.
They fell out of favor and then in 1952, at long last, the American Psychological Association said definitively that hysteria was not a real disease and the term was dropped from the diagnostic catalogue. Interestingly enough, as of 2009, it is still against the law in Alabama to buy a sex toy for anything other than medical purposes. To buy one, you have to sign a waiver stating that you are going to buy and use it for medical reasons. The Hitachi company marketed its plug-in Magic Wand vibrator as a massager until 2013.
A quick note: after doctors decided that hysteria was not as a result of a wandering uterus, there were men who were diagnosed with hysteria through the years, but they were incredibly few and far between. It impacted society's view of women for centuries.
Monday, January 23, 2017
The Goat Gonads and Quackery
The man that I am going to discuss was born John Romulus Brinkley, although he later changed his middle name to Richard because he was teased. He thus made himself John Richard Brinkley II and made his son John Richard Brinkley III. He was born in 1885, but the story really begins with his father. Brinkley Sr. was a doctor. He got married a total of five times. The first time Brinkley Sr. was married, it was annulled because he was too young to get married, so he must have been quite young. He went on to get married four more times all to women who were much younger than he was. At one point, he married a woman named Sarah, whose niece (also named Sarah) came to live with them. John Romulus was the product of his father and the niece Sarah. However, she died soon after, so he was raised by his father and the wife Sarah, although he referred to her as Aunt Sarah and was aware that she wasn't his mother. He was raised mainly by Aunt Sarah because his father passed away when he was fairly young. He came from pretty humble origins without a lot of money or a great educational background.
He started out as a patent medicine salesman. These were early medical hucksters who went around the country trying to sell people stuff that was called "patent medicines" but were not, in fact, medicine and did not actually have patents. He got married pretty early on to a younger woman named Sally and they did this as a team. The two of them ran a medicine show that they traveled with. Medicine shows were touring productions where people could go to get some entertainment, but these shows would also try to sell some fake medicine along with it. They usually posed as something exotic or unfamiliar to the average townsperson, so the Brinkleys pretended to be Quakers and tried to sell a Virility Tonic. But Brinkley really did have aspirations to be an actual doctor, so they eventually settled in Chicago and he entered the Bennett Medical College of Eclectic Medicine. Eclectic medicine was a popular branch of medicine in the early 1900s which drew from different areas of medicine, none of them particularly real. It involved a lot of herbal remedies and wasn't evidence based at all. He went to medical school during the day and worked at Western Union at night.
It was a bit of a struggle because he was raising a young family, he was constantly in debt and he was still trying to go to school. Plus, his marriage kept having problems. He came home one day and his wife had taken their daughter and run off and filed for divorce. So he tracked them down and found them. He then kidnapped his daughter and went to Canada for a while. All of this strife meant that he had several breaks in his medical education. Eventually, he came back and reconciled with Sally. Unfortunately, she became pregnant with a second child and ran away again. He tracked her and the two children down again and she told him that she didn't want him to go back to medical school and that she wanted him to stay home. Brinkley agreed that he wouldn't go back to school, but he still wanted to be a doctor so he gave up his dream for a little while before he started looking for medical schools near his then-home of Kansas City. He applied to several different medical schools, and then returned to Bennett school, requesting his school records. They rejected this request on the grounds that he owed them a buttload of tuition. Because they wouldn't forward his records, he couldn't actually attend any of the schools to which he had applied, including the one in Kansas City. However, the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University did not have what might be called high standards, so he was able to get a degree for $500. No actual attendance was necessary. That "degree" was actually good in about 8 states so he took his fake degree and started to try to get work as a doctor. The problem was that people knew that it was a fake degree so he was having trouble getting patients at first. Also, he hadn't completed any sort of a residency or apprenticeship so that made it hard for him to get work. So he was trying to find work, he was dragging his wife and now three kids around the country, and Sally basically said that she was through and left him. This time, he did not chase after her or the kids.
Brinkley moved to South Carolina and met this other doctor named Crawford, who was also a patent medicine man. Together, these two opened an office and started giving out injections for virility. This was a theme in Brinkley's life. Virility and fertility fascinated him. Their injections were really just colored water, which was common for patent medicine men at the time. They'd just give people something that looked like medicine. Brinkley and Crawford called this injection Electric Medicine from Germany and charged $25 a piece. After about two months, they hadn't paid any of their bills for the storefront that they had rented, for electricity, for their living quarters, or basically anything. They had passed some bad checks and had to sneak out of town before they were arrested. He headed on to Memphis where he got remarried. He met and fell in love with a much younger woman named Minnie, and 4 days later, they were married. While on their honeymoon, Brinkley was tracked down and arrested for passing all of those bad checks from South Carolina. He was taken back to South Carolina to stand trial and when he got there, he basically just blamed Crawford for the entire affair, so they tracked Crawford down as well. However, Minnie's father bailed Brinkley out of jail, because he was an actual medical doctor who had some money. Brinkley then returned to Memphis to get back to his life, when Sally showed up, having tracked him down with her three kids in tow and she was very angry. She didn't want him back, but she was very against the bigamy, so she showed up to tell Minnie, who apparently didn't care. Their only concern was with the fact that it was illegal, so they hightailed it out of town.
At this point, Brinkley was travelling around, trying to get some work as a doctor, and he eventually made enough money to pay off Bennett Medical College so that they would release his medical records to Kansas City so that they could officially graduate him, not after he completed any more training, but because he paid them an extra $100. So at that point, it wasn't one of their fake degrees, it was one of their real degrees. However, this degree was still from, even by the standards of the time, an extremely questionable medical school. He started working at a meat packing plant, but he was doing medical work there for the workers as a sort of on staff doctor. This is an important point because it is at this point where he becomes interested in goats. Goat meat was among the meats that were packed at the plant and he noticed in the slaughterhouse that the goats specifically were always having sex. He was already fascinated with virility, so at this point, he started piecing together a way to take his knowledge of goat horniness and his fake medical knowledge and using it to help mankind.
This was almost the end of his story because right as he was about to take this great revelation about goats, World War I happened, which almost ended his career because he was a reservist. However, he only served two months because he spent almost the entire time hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. After this, he decided that he and Minnie should settle down in Milford, Kansas, which was the site of his great revelation. First of all, he started working in Milford right at the onset of the Flu Epidemic of 1918. He made quite a name for himself because he had a good bedside manner and he was really well liked by the people that he cared for. It helped that there was a huge influx of patients that were in desperate need of medical care who didn't necessarily have the time to check credentials. The other benefit to this for Brinkley was that, at the time, there was almost nothing that any doctor could do to cure the flu, so just being there and making patients as comfortable as possible was about all any doctor could do. Fortunately for him, he was good at this.
Soon, a young man shows up at Brinkley's office. He was there for what he called "sexual weakness". The young man asked if there was anything Brinkley could do to help improve his virility. Brinkley very enthusiastically told the young man about goats and casually mentioned that if the young man had goat testicles, then he wouldn't have any problems. The young man thought his was a spectacular idea, so Brinkley agreed to implant goat testicles into this young man for $150. So not only did he talk this guy into letting Brinkley perform an experimental and highly dubious surgery on him, but $150 in 1918 was quite a sum. Basically, the way that Brinkley would do this surgery was that he would just make an incision in the scrotum, place the goat testicles inside, then sew it back up without removing the original human testicles. The young man, after the surgery, claimed that it worked. This is supported by the fact that his wife got pregnant shortly afterwards. Even better, it was a boy. The couple actually went on to name the child "Billy" in homage to the goat. After word got around, everybody was clamoring for this procedure.
It is worth pointing out that he was not the only doctor who was experimenting with this idea at the time. There were doctors in Europe who were taking the material from testicles, not actual testicles themselves but crushed pieces of dog, goat, or monkey testicles, and injecting it into human testicles in an effort to do the same thing. This is probably for what we would call erectile dysfunction today. The operation really took off in Milford and Brinkley started charging $750 per procedure, which would be about the equivalent of $8800 per surgery today. The problem with this was that the more times that he did these surgeries, the more opportunity there was for things to go wrong. All through this time period, especially this next part, it is important to keep in mind that he is constantly being sued. There were wrongful death suits as well as people suing him because it did not work. Although, an overwhelming majority of people who got the operation claimed that it did work to the point where Brinkley only advertised it for what he called "intelligent patients". He performed this procedure on women as well as men. He put the goat testicles about where he thought that her ovaries might be. He would give them either goat testicles or goat ovaries and the way that he decided which one a woman got was based on what gender child she wanted. If the patient wanted a male child, she would get goat testes, if she wanted a female child, she would get goat ovaries.
He advertised very heavily and the more surgeries that he performed the more maladies that he claimed he could fix. He no longer just claimed to be able to fix virility and fertility, but also the flu, dementia, emphysema, insanity, acne, and hypertension. This was related to his belief that sex energy was the basis for all energy. He thought that goat testes contained "vitamin" which was "an indeterminate substance", but which he thought was very important. He ran into a hiccup when he tried to use Angora goats instead of Toggenburg goats. Apparently, Angora goat testes smell bad, so his patients were unhappy with this change. That's what happens when businessmen try to cut costs and use substandard materials. People notice. At this point, the AMA started to get involved, trying to shut him down. But the more that they tried to advertise him as a quack, the more Brinkley asserted that the AMA was trying to hide this great product from the masses.
He relied a lot on testimonials and actually started a radio show. He would answer questions and advertise all of his products and procedures. He got a lot of publicity when he did the procedure on the then owner of the LA Times, who felt like it worked really well. Brinkley actually spent a lot of time in LA and got a lot of endorsement from the Hollywood crowd. It is said that he performed this procedure on some famous stars of the time. This is why the term "goat gland" was used at the time in Hollywood for when they would add voiceover to a silent film after the advent of talkies. He built a radio station in Mexico to continue to advertise, which was the beginning of what is known as "Border Blasters", which are radio stations that send their signals across the border. This is the subject of the song "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Sound. That way, he could avoid any laws about being a charlatan on the air. There were laws against, for instance, fortune telling on American radio stations. He would broadcast via telephone to the US from Mexico, which is actually specifically banned now by the Brinkley Act, named for him. He would give advice, sell medication, and he actually launched the careers of several country music singers of the time that way. He would also sell other fake memorabilia. A notable example of this would be that he sold autographed pictures of Jesus. Eventually, he expanded to adding human testicles for transplant, which he got from criminals who were on death row. This procedure was a lofty $5000. In addition, he opened the National Dr. Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association and sold a lot of colored water that way.
Brinkley made what is known in some circles as a lot of lettuce. He had several houses and cars and was just filthy rich until 1930 when the AMA was finally able to build a case against him and sued him for literally all that he was worth. They shut down his medical operation and the FRC was working on shutting down his radio station. Every time they made a law, he would skirt it, but eventually, they made enough laws to shut him down permanently. At this point, he was actually also violating international treaties because of the back and forth across the border. As they shut him down, his last ditch effort to stop it was to run for governor of Kansas, which he did three times and almost won. This was as a write-in candidate. His thinking was that he could give himself his medical license back. He actually went down in history as the Milford Messiah because of this. All in all, he did about 16,000 of these transplants. However, his life had become a spiral. In addition to the AMA and the FRC, he was investigated for tax fraud and for mail fraud and by 1941 he had to declare bankruptcy, when he lost everything. In 1942, he had several blood clots, lost his leg, had several heart attacks, and passed away.
He started out as a patent medicine salesman. These were early medical hucksters who went around the country trying to sell people stuff that was called "patent medicines" but were not, in fact, medicine and did not actually have patents. He got married pretty early on to a younger woman named Sally and they did this as a team. The two of them ran a medicine show that they traveled with. Medicine shows were touring productions where people could go to get some entertainment, but these shows would also try to sell some fake medicine along with it. They usually posed as something exotic or unfamiliar to the average townsperson, so the Brinkleys pretended to be Quakers and tried to sell a Virility Tonic. But Brinkley really did have aspirations to be an actual doctor, so they eventually settled in Chicago and he entered the Bennett Medical College of Eclectic Medicine. Eclectic medicine was a popular branch of medicine in the early 1900s which drew from different areas of medicine, none of them particularly real. It involved a lot of herbal remedies and wasn't evidence based at all. He went to medical school during the day and worked at Western Union at night.
It was a bit of a struggle because he was raising a young family, he was constantly in debt and he was still trying to go to school. Plus, his marriage kept having problems. He came home one day and his wife had taken their daughter and run off and filed for divorce. So he tracked them down and found them. He then kidnapped his daughter and went to Canada for a while. All of this strife meant that he had several breaks in his medical education. Eventually, he came back and reconciled with Sally. Unfortunately, she became pregnant with a second child and ran away again. He tracked her and the two children down again and she told him that she didn't want him to go back to medical school and that she wanted him to stay home. Brinkley agreed that he wouldn't go back to school, but he still wanted to be a doctor so he gave up his dream for a little while before he started looking for medical schools near his then-home of Kansas City. He applied to several different medical schools, and then returned to Bennett school, requesting his school records. They rejected this request on the grounds that he owed them a buttload of tuition. Because they wouldn't forward his records, he couldn't actually attend any of the schools to which he had applied, including the one in Kansas City. However, the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University did not have what might be called high standards, so he was able to get a degree for $500. No actual attendance was necessary. That "degree" was actually good in about 8 states so he took his fake degree and started to try to get work as a doctor. The problem was that people knew that it was a fake degree so he was having trouble getting patients at first. Also, he hadn't completed any sort of a residency or apprenticeship so that made it hard for him to get work. So he was trying to find work, he was dragging his wife and now three kids around the country, and Sally basically said that she was through and left him. This time, he did not chase after her or the kids.
Brinkley moved to South Carolina and met this other doctor named Crawford, who was also a patent medicine man. Together, these two opened an office and started giving out injections for virility. This was a theme in Brinkley's life. Virility and fertility fascinated him. Their injections were really just colored water, which was common for patent medicine men at the time. They'd just give people something that looked like medicine. Brinkley and Crawford called this injection Electric Medicine from Germany and charged $25 a piece. After about two months, they hadn't paid any of their bills for the storefront that they had rented, for electricity, for their living quarters, or basically anything. They had passed some bad checks and had to sneak out of town before they were arrested. He headed on to Memphis where he got remarried. He met and fell in love with a much younger woman named Minnie, and 4 days later, they were married. While on their honeymoon, Brinkley was tracked down and arrested for passing all of those bad checks from South Carolina. He was taken back to South Carolina to stand trial and when he got there, he basically just blamed Crawford for the entire affair, so they tracked Crawford down as well. However, Minnie's father bailed Brinkley out of jail, because he was an actual medical doctor who had some money. Brinkley then returned to Memphis to get back to his life, when Sally showed up, having tracked him down with her three kids in tow and she was very angry. She didn't want him back, but she was very against the bigamy, so she showed up to tell Minnie, who apparently didn't care. Their only concern was with the fact that it was illegal, so they hightailed it out of town.
At this point, Brinkley was travelling around, trying to get some work as a doctor, and he eventually made enough money to pay off Bennett Medical College so that they would release his medical records to Kansas City so that they could officially graduate him, not after he completed any more training, but because he paid them an extra $100. So at that point, it wasn't one of their fake degrees, it was one of their real degrees. However, this degree was still from, even by the standards of the time, an extremely questionable medical school. He started working at a meat packing plant, but he was doing medical work there for the workers as a sort of on staff doctor. This is an important point because it is at this point where he becomes interested in goats. Goat meat was among the meats that were packed at the plant and he noticed in the slaughterhouse that the goats specifically were always having sex. He was already fascinated with virility, so at this point, he started piecing together a way to take his knowledge of goat horniness and his fake medical knowledge and using it to help mankind.
This was almost the end of his story because right as he was about to take this great revelation about goats, World War I happened, which almost ended his career because he was a reservist. However, he only served two months because he spent almost the entire time hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. After this, he decided that he and Minnie should settle down in Milford, Kansas, which was the site of his great revelation. First of all, he started working in Milford right at the onset of the Flu Epidemic of 1918. He made quite a name for himself because he had a good bedside manner and he was really well liked by the people that he cared for. It helped that there was a huge influx of patients that were in desperate need of medical care who didn't necessarily have the time to check credentials. The other benefit to this for Brinkley was that, at the time, there was almost nothing that any doctor could do to cure the flu, so just being there and making patients as comfortable as possible was about all any doctor could do. Fortunately for him, he was good at this.
Soon, a young man shows up at Brinkley's office. He was there for what he called "sexual weakness". The young man asked if there was anything Brinkley could do to help improve his virility. Brinkley very enthusiastically told the young man about goats and casually mentioned that if the young man had goat testicles, then he wouldn't have any problems. The young man thought his was a spectacular idea, so Brinkley agreed to implant goat testicles into this young man for $150. So not only did he talk this guy into letting Brinkley perform an experimental and highly dubious surgery on him, but $150 in 1918 was quite a sum. Basically, the way that Brinkley would do this surgery was that he would just make an incision in the scrotum, place the goat testicles inside, then sew it back up without removing the original human testicles. The young man, after the surgery, claimed that it worked. This is supported by the fact that his wife got pregnant shortly afterwards. Even better, it was a boy. The couple actually went on to name the child "Billy" in homage to the goat. After word got around, everybody was clamoring for this procedure.
It is worth pointing out that he was not the only doctor who was experimenting with this idea at the time. There were doctors in Europe who were taking the material from testicles, not actual testicles themselves but crushed pieces of dog, goat, or monkey testicles, and injecting it into human testicles in an effort to do the same thing. This is probably for what we would call erectile dysfunction today. The operation really took off in Milford and Brinkley started charging $750 per procedure, which would be about the equivalent of $8800 per surgery today. The problem with this was that the more times that he did these surgeries, the more opportunity there was for things to go wrong. All through this time period, especially this next part, it is important to keep in mind that he is constantly being sued. There were wrongful death suits as well as people suing him because it did not work. Although, an overwhelming majority of people who got the operation claimed that it did work to the point where Brinkley only advertised it for what he called "intelligent patients". He performed this procedure on women as well as men. He put the goat testicles about where he thought that her ovaries might be. He would give them either goat testicles or goat ovaries and the way that he decided which one a woman got was based on what gender child she wanted. If the patient wanted a male child, she would get goat testes, if she wanted a female child, she would get goat ovaries.
He advertised very heavily and the more surgeries that he performed the more maladies that he claimed he could fix. He no longer just claimed to be able to fix virility and fertility, but also the flu, dementia, emphysema, insanity, acne, and hypertension. This was related to his belief that sex energy was the basis for all energy. He thought that goat testes contained "vitamin" which was "an indeterminate substance", but which he thought was very important. He ran into a hiccup when he tried to use Angora goats instead of Toggenburg goats. Apparently, Angora goat testes smell bad, so his patients were unhappy with this change. That's what happens when businessmen try to cut costs and use substandard materials. People notice. At this point, the AMA started to get involved, trying to shut him down. But the more that they tried to advertise him as a quack, the more Brinkley asserted that the AMA was trying to hide this great product from the masses.
He relied a lot on testimonials and actually started a radio show. He would answer questions and advertise all of his products and procedures. He got a lot of publicity when he did the procedure on the then owner of the LA Times, who felt like it worked really well. Brinkley actually spent a lot of time in LA and got a lot of endorsement from the Hollywood crowd. It is said that he performed this procedure on some famous stars of the time. This is why the term "goat gland" was used at the time in Hollywood for when they would add voiceover to a silent film after the advent of talkies. He built a radio station in Mexico to continue to advertise, which was the beginning of what is known as "Border Blasters", which are radio stations that send their signals across the border. This is the subject of the song "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Sound. That way, he could avoid any laws about being a charlatan on the air. There were laws against, for instance, fortune telling on American radio stations. He would broadcast via telephone to the US from Mexico, which is actually specifically banned now by the Brinkley Act, named for him. He would give advice, sell medication, and he actually launched the careers of several country music singers of the time that way. He would also sell other fake memorabilia. A notable example of this would be that he sold autographed pictures of Jesus. Eventually, he expanded to adding human testicles for transplant, which he got from criminals who were on death row. This procedure was a lofty $5000. In addition, he opened the National Dr. Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association and sold a lot of colored water that way.
Brinkley made what is known in some circles as a lot of lettuce. He had several houses and cars and was just filthy rich until 1930 when the AMA was finally able to build a case against him and sued him for literally all that he was worth. They shut down his medical operation and the FRC was working on shutting down his radio station. Every time they made a law, he would skirt it, but eventually, they made enough laws to shut him down permanently. At this point, he was actually also violating international treaties because of the back and forth across the border. As they shut him down, his last ditch effort to stop it was to run for governor of Kansas, which he did three times and almost won. This was as a write-in candidate. His thinking was that he could give himself his medical license back. He actually went down in history as the Milford Messiah because of this. All in all, he did about 16,000 of these transplants. However, his life had become a spiral. In addition to the AMA and the FRC, he was investigated for tax fraud and for mail fraud and by 1941 he had to declare bankruptcy, when he lost everything. In 1942, he had several blood clots, lost his leg, had several heart attacks, and passed away.
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