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.
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