The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley (review)

Oliver Wendell Holmes described quackery as immortal, and certainly history supports his assessment. So too has been our fascination with the rogues who practiced the art over the centuries. High in the hagiography of American quackery is John R. Brinkley (1885-1942). Because of his profound influence in more reputable areas of our culture—specifically, radio advertising and political innovations—a case can be made that Brinkley was the most important medical charlatan in our history. R. Alton Lee has given us the finest account yet of the Brinkley story. The paid biography by Clement Wood (1934) gives the most detail of Brinkley's early life, but it is largely unreliable. In 1960 Gerald Carson published a popular account of Brinkley, which lacks footnotes and much of the detail that puts Lee's book in a category of its own.

To oversimplify the story, soon after Brinkley began practice in Milford, Kansas, he decided he could sustain human vitality, particularly male sexual potency, by adding goat testes to his patients' natural system—that is, by transplantation. At first consideration this surgical audacity appears incredible, but few commentators have emphasized sufficiently that Brinkley had the developing field of endocrinology as an unwitting ally. As early as 1849 an experimenter showed that the effects of castration did not appear in an animal after removal of its testicles if the excised glands were relocated and survived in the same body. Interspecies transplantation was a different matter: we now know that goat testes would have atrophied when implanted in man. He was doing what he said he was doing, but what he did would not do what he claimed.

Nevertheless, he was a phenomenal success. First by word of mouth, and later with the 5,000 watt radio station he constructed in Milford, Brinkley rapidly became a national figure. When the Federal Radio Commission denied renewal of his license, Brinkley simply moved his operation to Del Rio, Texas, where he built a 50,000 watt transmitter across the Rio Grande capable of reaching the entire North American continent. Lee's account of Brinkley's radio innovations and mastery of radio advertising is superbly detailed.

Brinkley's success finally exhausted the patience of Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who would hound Brinkley with the zeal and tenacity of a bail bondsman until he died, discredited and bankrupt, in 1942. Brinkley proved a crafty opponent. In 1930 he declared himself a write-in candidate for governor of Kansas. By all accounts he ran the first modern political campaign in history: in addition to his consummate use of radio, he used air and ground transportation as no one had before. In effect, he revived the populism that had dominated Kansas politics a half-century earlier. The preponderance of evidence is that Kansas voters elected Brinkley governor that day, but he was denied office by discarded ballots—leading to a conflict reminiscent of Florida in 2000.

Was Brinkley a quack? The word can be difficult to apply in specific cases. Webster's "one who pretends to have knowledge and skill he does not have" could fit most physicians of the time. Ultimately it is a moral matter, definable only by the practitioner's conscience. Lee's definitive treatment of Brinkley will leave few doubting that he earned the label of quack. Still, given his pioneering contributions to the fields of radio advertising and politics, historians will have to give him his due in those areas long after the fascinating saga of his quackery has faded.