John R. Brinkley

John Romulus Brinkley (later John Richard Brinkley; July 8, 1885–May 26, 1942) was a controversial American medical doctor who experimented with xenotransplantation of goat glands into humans as a means of curing male impotence, and an advertising and radio pioneer who began the era of Mexican border blasters.

Early life

Brinkley was born to John Richard Brinkley, a poor mountain man who practiced medicine in North Carolina and served as a medic for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Father Brinkley's first marriage was annulled because he was underage. After he reached adulthood, he married four more times, and outlived each of his young, pretty wives. In 1870, at the age of 42, he married Sarah T. Mingus. Later, the 24-year-old niece of Mingus moved into the house: Sarah Candice Burnett. The family called Brinkley's wife "Sally" to differentiate between the two Sarahs. Sarah Burnett gave birth to John Romulus Brinkley in the town of Beta, in Jackson County, North Carolina, naming her son after his father, and after Romulus, the mythical twin suckled by wolves. Sarah Burnett died of pneumonia and tuberculosis when Brinkley was five. Sarah T. "Aunt Sally" and John Brinkley moved with the young boy to East LaPorte within the same county, near the Tuckasegee River. The family had little money, and lived close to the earth. John Richard Brinkley died when his son was ten years old. Young Brinkley attended a one-room log cabin school in the Tuckasegee area, held each year during three or four months of winter. There, Brinkley met Sally Margaret Wike, the daughter of a well-off school board member. When Brinkley was 13, the school term was lengthened, and a better teacher engaged. Brinkley finished his studies at 16 and began to work carrying mail between local towns, and to learn how to use a telegraph. He wished, however, to become a doctor.

Family and education

As a telegrapher, Brinkley went to New York City to work for Western Union, after which he moved to New Jersey to work at one then another railway company. In late 1906, he returned home to Aunt Sally after hearing that she was unwell. She died on December 25, 1906. Afterward, he was comforted by Sally Wike, now 22 and a year older than Brinkley. They married on January 27, 1907 in Sylva, North Carolina. They traveled around posing as Quaker doctors, giving rural towns a medicine show where they hawked a patent medicine. Brinkley's next move was to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he played right-hand man, helping hawk virility "tonics" with a man named Dr. Burke.

In 1907, Brinkley settled with his wife in Chicago, where they celebrated the birth of a daughter on November 5: Wanda Marion Brinkley. The new father enrolled at Bennett Medical College, an unaccredited school with questionable curricula focused on Eclectic medicine. Brinkley worked for Western Union as a telegrapher at night and attended classes during the day, while debts mounted from tuition, the cost of raising a family, and from Sally's self-centered whims. In 1908, the Brinkleys buried an infant son who had lived only three days.

At school, Brinkley was introduced to the study of glandular extracts and their effects on the human system. He determined that this new field would help move his career forward. After two years of studies, and ever-deeper debts, Brinkley doubled his summer workload by taking two shifts at Western Union, but came home one day to find his wife and daughter gone. Sally filed for divorce and child support, but after two months of payments, Brinkley kidnapped his daughter and fled with her to Canada. Sally Brinkley, unable to obtain an extradition order from Canada, dismissed her suit for alimony and child support, allowing Brinkley to return to Chicago with the child. The couple reunited in their rocky marriage.

In 1911, before Brinkley was finished with his third year of studies, Sally left him again, and bore him another daughter, Erna Maxine Brinkley, on July 11, 1911 back home in the Tuckasegee area. Brinkley left Chicago and his unpaid tuition bills to return to North Carolina and join his family. There, he began working as an "undergraduate physician", but failed to establish himself. He moved his family around to different towns in Florida and North Carolina, "packing up and going all the time from one place to another."

Diploma mill

In 1912, Brinkley left his family to try to regain the thread of his education, this time in St. Louis, Missouri. He was unable to pay Bennett Medical College the tuition he owed them, so they refused to forward his scholastic records to any of the medical schools that Brinkley had approached. Instead, Brinkley bought a certificate from a shady diploma mill, and returned home. On February 11, 1913 his daughter Naomi Beryl Brinkley was born. The family of five immediately moved to New York City, and shortly to Chicago. When Brinkley refused to give up his goal of becoming a doctor, Sally Brinkley left him one final time, taking the three girls home to North Carolina.

Brinkley set up a storefront business in Greenville, South Carolina with a man named Crawford. The two opened their shop as the "Greenville Electro Medic Doctors", and placed advertisements to attract men who were concerned about their manly vigor. They injected colored water into their patients at $25 a shot, telling them it was Salvarsan or "electric medicine from Germany." After two months, the partners hurriedly left town with unpaid rent, utility bills and debts for clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. The local newspaper reported that the duo left about 30 to 40 local merchants with unpaid checks. They ended up where Crawford had once lived, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Second marriage

In Memphis, Brinkley met 21-year-old Minerva Telitha "Minnie" Jones, a friend of Crawford's and the daughter of a local physician. On August 23, 1913, after a four-day courtship, Brinkley and Jones married at the Peabody Hotel, even though he was still married to Sally Brinkley. Minnie and John Brinkley honeymooned in Kansas City, Denver, Pocatello and Knoxville. Brinkley was arrested in Knoxville and extradited to Greenville where he was put in jail for practicing medicine without a license and for writing bad checks. Brinkley told the sheriff that it was all Crawford's fault, and gave investigators enough information that they were able to nab Crawford in Pocatello. The two former partners met again in jail.

Brinkley and Crawford decided to settle out of court with Greenville's angry merchants for a sum of several thousand dollars, most of which Crawford paid. Brinkley's new father-in-law paid Brinkley's bail, but only contributed $200 to his fraudulent debt settlement. Brinkley rejoined Minnie Brinkley in Memphis. There, Sally Brinkley confronted the couple, informing Minnie Brinkley that her husband was a bigamist. Minnie and John Brinkley moved to Judsonia, Arkansas, where he again obtained an "undergraduate license" to practice medicine, advertising his specialty as "diseases of women and children". He made little profit, and joined the Army Reserve Medical Corps.

Brinkley accepted an offer to take over the office of another doctor who was moving out of state. Brinkley began to turn a modest profit, and was finally able to pay Bennett Medical College the amount owed for tuition. In October, 1914 the Brinkleys moved to Kansas City where he enrolled at that city's Eclectic Medical University to finish out his last year remaining of the education he started at Bennett. After studying the irritations and enlargements of the prostate gland in elderly men, and paying the university $100, Brinkley graduated on May 7, 1915. His diploma from Eclectic allowed him to practice medicine in eight states.

In 1917, Brinkley, now an Army Reservist, was called up for service during World War I. However, he only served a little over two months, most of the duration of which he was sick, before being discharged. In October of the same year, Brinkley and his wife moved to Milford, Kansas after having spotted a newspaper ad saying the town needed a doctor.

Goat gland transplantation

In 1918, Brinkley opened a 16-room clinic in Milford, where he won over the locals immediately by paying good wages, invigorating the local economy and making house calls on patients afflicted with the virulent and deadly outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic. For all his later infamy as a charlatan, accounts of his success at nursing flu victims back to health, and the lengths to which he went to treat them, were resoundingly positive.

At his clinic, Brinkley began to perform operations he claimed would restore male virility and fertility through implanting the testicular glands of goats in his male patients at a cost of $750 per operation ($11,400 in current value.) Following one of his crude operations, the body of a patient would typically absorb the goat gonads as foreign matter. The organs were never accepted as part of the body since they were simply placed into the human male testicle sac or the abdomen of women, near the ovaries. Unsurprisingly, in light of his questionable medical training (75 percent completion at a less-than-reputable medical school), frequency of operating while intoxicated and less-than sterile operating environments, some patients suffered from infection, and an undetermined number died. Brinkley would be sued more than a dozen times for wrongful death between 1930 and 1941.

Soon after Brinkley opened up shop, he scored an advertising coup that made major newspapers come calling: His first goat gland transplantation patient's wife gave birth to a baby boy. Brinkley began promoting goat glands as a cure for 27 ailments, ranging from dementia to emphysema to flatulence. He started a direct mail blitz and hired an advertising agent, who helped Brinkley portray his treatments as turning hapless men into "the ram that am with every lamb." His burst of publicity—and his stratospheric claims—attracted the attention of the American Medical Association, which sent an agent to the clinic to investigate undercover. The agent found a woman hobbling around Brinkley's clinic who had been given goat ovaries as a cure for a spinal cord tumor. From then on, Brinkley was on the AMA's radar, including catching the eye of the doctor that would eventually be responsible for his downfall, Morris Fishbein, who made his career exposing medical frauds.

At the same time, other doctors were also experimenting with gland transplantation, including Serge Voronoff, who had become known for grafting monkey testicles into human men. In 1920 Voronoff demonstrated his technique before several other doctors at a hospital in Chicago, at which Brinkley showed up uninvited. Though Brinkley was barred at the door, his appearance elevated his profile in the press, which eventually resulted in his own demonstration at a hospital in Chicago. Brinkley transplanted goat testicles into 34 patients, including a judge, an alderman, a society matron and the chancellor of the University of Chicago Law School, all while the press looked on. His public profile grew, and his gland business in Milford continued at a brisk pace.

In 1922, Brinkley traveled to Los Angeles at the invitation of Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, who challenged Brinkley to transplant goat testicles into one of his editors. If the operation was a success, Chandler wrote, he would make Brinkley the "most famous surgeon in America," and if not then he should consider himself "damned." California didn't recognize Brinkley's license to practice medicine from the Eclectic Medical University, but Chandler pulled some strings and got him a 30-day permit. The operation was judged a success, and Brinkley received his promised attention in Chandler's paper, which sent many new customers Brinkley's way, including some Hollywood film stars. Brinkley was so taken with the city—and all the money it represented in the form of potential patients—that he began making plans to relocate his clinic there. But his hopes were dashed when the California medical board denied his application for a permanent license to practice medicine, having found his resume "riddled with lies and discrepancies" (most of which were discovered and pointed out to the board by Fishbein). Brinkley returned to Kansas undaunted and began to expand his clinic in Milford.

Brinkley's first radio station

While in Los Angeles, Brinkley toured KHJ, a radio station Chandler owned. He immediately saw the power radio held as an advertising and marketing medium and resolved to build his own to promote his services, even though at the time advertising on public airwaves was very much discouraged. By 1923 he had enough capital to build KFKB ("Kansas First, Kansas Best") using a 1 kilowatt transmitter, as the first radio station in the state of Kansas, although there is some debate on this since a station in nearby Manhattan was licensed before this. That same year, the St. Louis Star published a scathing expose of medical diploma mills, and in 1924 the Kansas City Journal Post followed suit, bringing unwelcome attention Brinkley's way. In July 1924, a grand jury in San Francisco handed down 19 indictments to people responsible for conferring fake medical degrees, and for some doctors who received them; Brinkley was one, due mostly to his questionable application for a California medical license. When agents from California came to arrest Brinkley, the governor of Kansas refused to extradite him because he made the state too much money. Brinkley took to his radio station's airwaves to crow about his victory over the American Medical Association and Fishbein, who by this time had started giving speeches and writing articles for the Journal of the American Medical Association deriding Brinkley and his treatments as quackery. His gland business made more money than ever, and had begun attracting patients from around the globe.

Brinkley crooned for hours on end each day, primarily promoting his goat gland treatments. He variously cajoled, shamed and appealed to men's (and women's) egos, and to their desire to be more sexually active. In between Brinkley's own advertisements, his new station featured a variety of entertainment including military bands, French lessons, astrological forecasts, storytelling and exotica such as native Hawaiian songs, and American roots music such as bluegrass, gospel and country.

Eager for better credentials, in 1925 Brinkley traveled to Europe searching for honorary degrees. After being rebuffed by several institutes in the United Kingdom, Brinkley found a willing suitor in the university in Pavia, Italy. Fishbein and Brinkley's former teacher, Max Thorek, heard about the degree and pressured the Italian government to rescind it. Benito Mussolini himself revoked the degree, though Brinkley claimed it until he died. Fishbein's interest in putting Brinkley out of business grew and he wrote more articles featuring stories about people who had grown sick or died after seeing Brinkley. But the AMA journal's readership was mostly restricted to other doctors, while Brinkley's radio station poured directly into peoples' homes every day.

Medical Question Box

Brinkley began claiming his goat glands could also help male prostate problems, and expanded his business again. He also started a new radio segment called "Medical Question Box," where he would read listeners' medical complaints over the air and suggest proprietary treatments. These treatments were only available at a network of pharmacies that were members of the "Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association." These affiliated pharmacies sold Brinkley's over the counter medicines at highly inflated prices, sent a portion of their profit back to Brinkley and kept the rest. It is estimated that this generated $14,000 in profit weekly for Brinkley, or about $13,300,000 per year in current value. Reports of patients who took Brinkley's suggested treatments showing up sick at another doctor's office began to grow, and eventually Merck pharmaceuticals, whose medicines Brinkley routinely misprescribed, requested Fishbein take action; the AMA responded that they had no power over Brinkley, save to try to inform the public.

The Kansas City Star, which owned a radio station that competed with Brinkley's, ran an unfavorable series of reports on him. By 1930, when the Kansas Medical Board held a formal hearing to decide whether Brinkley's medical license should be revoked, Brinkley had signed death certificates for 42 people, many of whom were not sick when they showed up at his clinic. It is unclear how many more of Brinkley's patients may have become ill or later died elsewhere. In the same year the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew his station’s broadcasting license. He sued the commission, and the case Brinkley v. FRC became a landmark case in broadcast law.

Political career

Brinkley reacted to losing both his medical and broadcast licenses by campaigning for Governor of Kansas, a political position that would enable him to appoint his own members to the medical board and thus regain his right to practice medicine in the state. He campaigned on a vague program of public works (a state lake in every county) and education (free textbooks for public schoolchildren and increased educational opportunities for blacks). His campaign was conducted as an independent write-in candidate, because he resolved to run for governor in September, after the ballots had already been printed. While he attempted to educate his voters in the correct method to cast a write-in vote, each county election commission made its own decisions as to the standard for such votes actually counting. As a write-in candidate, he received 183,278 votes (29.5 percent of the vote) and lost. Kansas political lore is that Brinkley may have actually gotten enough votes to win the election, but large numbers of ballots were disallowed. Brinkley lost to Harry Hines Woodring, later Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of war.

Brinkley ran again in 1932 as an Independent, receiving 244,607 votes (30.6 percent of the vote), losing to Republican Alfred M. Landon, later Republican nominee for President. Because he lacked a medical license to practice in Kansas, he moved his medical business in 1933 into the Roswell Hotel in Del Rio, Texas.

Move to Del Rio, Texas

Having lost his radio license in the United States, in 1931 Brinkley obtained one instead from the government of Mexico. He proceeded to construct a 75-kilowatt station at 840 kilohertz on the AM dial, radiated by a sky wave antenna held aloft by 300-foot towers. His station at Villa Acuña, Coahuila, (since renamed Ciudad Acuña) was located on the other side of the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas.

Under the call sign of XER, Brinkley used his new border blaster to resume his campaign for governor once again by using landlines to the transmitter since its sky wave signal could be heard in Kansas and as far north as Canada. This approach did not work, and he lost yet another political campaign; he would lose again in 1934. Meanwhile Brinkley had resumed his medical practice over the airwaves. Male listeners were offered an array of expensive concoctions which included Mercurochrome injections and pills, all designed to help them regain their sexual prowess. At the clinic in the hotel he also performed prostate operations. For a short period of time, he lost his broadcast license and had to broadcast from XEPN, a "border blaster" in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.

His house, commonly called the Brinkley Mansion, still stands today at 512 Qualia Drive in Del Rio and is considered a historical landmark.

Brinkley and radio

At this time radio station WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio, was operating with an experimental AM broadcasting license with an RCA transmitter power of 500 kilowatts. It was the most powerful AM radio station ever licensed in the USA. Brinkley asked RCA to build a similar transmitter for his broadcasting site in Mexico.

The government of Mexico issued a license to Brinkley's partner Ramon D. Bosquez for this new station under the new call letters of XERA. Up until this time the United States had ignored protests from Mexico about the intrusion of signals from US radio stations into Mexican broadcasting bands; XERA was a form of radio "war" by retaliation.

When XERA signed on, its huge new high-gain antenna sent its clear sky wave signals over Canada and the North Pole and into Russia. It has been claimed that the USSR tuned to XERA where the NKVD (later KGB) used the programs to train their spies in the English language.

Other American promoters became inspired by the advent of border blaster radio and many new stations were added along various points of the Mexican border with the United States.

With the advent of World War II in Europe, but before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the America's declaration of war, Brinkley extended his radio support to the sympathizers of Nazi Germany by giving airtime to people such as Gerald Winrod, Fritz Kuhn, and William Dudley Pelley. This aroused the ire of the American government. In April 1941, the Mexican government made a deal with the United States to restrict renegade stations such as XERA. This put Brinkley's station out of business.

The United States banned cross-border links between U.S. radio studios and Mexican transmitters without a U.S. license by enacting legislation that became known as the Brinkley Act. This law was followed by U.S. recognition of Mexico's own clear channels and Mexico's agreement to regulate border blasters—as a result the government of Mexico took control of XERA in 1939.

Death

Brinkley's final years were not good. He had lost his radio station, he had lost a libel suit against Fishbein, several of his former patients sued him for malpractice, the Internal Revenue Service investigated him and the United States Postal Service indicted him for mail fraud. On January 31, 1941, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Brinkley then became a medical patient himself, having suffered three heart attacks and the amputation of one of his legs due to poor circulation. On May 26, 1942 Brinkley died penniless of heart failure in San Antonio. He was later buried in Memphis, Tennessee.

See also

• XER – at Villa Acuña, Coahuila, opposite Del Rio, Texas.
• XERA – replaced radio station XER.
• XEAW – at Reynosa, Tamaulipas, opposite McAllen, Texas.
• XERF – new station that was granted a license by Mexico for Ciudad Acuña at a different location,
• "Goat gland" film, slang for a largely silent film with sound sequences added to augment marketability

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Bonner, Thomas Neville. The Kansas doctor: a century of pioneering, University of Kansas Press, 1959, p. 210.
• Brinkley, John R. Dr. Brinkley's Doctor Book, J.R. Brinkley, 1937.
• Brock, Pope. Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, Crown Publishing. 2008. ISBN 0-3073-3988-2
• Carson, Gerald. The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley, Rinehart, New York, 1960.
• Fowler, Gene and Crawford, Bill. Border Radio: Quacks, yodelers, pitchmen, psychics, and other amazing broadcasters of the American airwaves, Texas Monthly Press, Austin. 1987. ISBN 0-87719-066-6
• Hale, Will Thomas and Merritt, Dixon Lanier. A History of Tennessee and Tennesseans, Volume VII, Lewis Publishing, 1913, pp. 2026–2027.
• Lee, R. Alton. The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley, University Press of Kentucky. 2002. ISBN 0-8131-2232-5
• Lichty, Lawrence Wilson and Topping, Malachi C. American broadcasting: a source book on the history of radio and television, Hastings House, 1975, p. 558.
• Musial, Matthew. Doctor Brinkley: A Man and His Calling, illustrated, Del Rio. 1983. (16 page comic book biography)
• Resler, Ansel Harlan. The Impact of John R. Brinkley on Broadcasting in the United States, Northwestern University, 1958
• Rudel, Anthony J. Hello, Everybody!, Harcourt, 2008. ISBN 978-0-15-101275-6
• Wallis, James Harold. The politician; his habits, outcries, and protective coloring, Arno Press, 1974. ISBN 0-405-05904-3
• Wood, Clement. The Life of a Man: A Biography of John R. Brinkley, Goshorn, 1937.

External links

• Grift, Goats, and Gonads
• Dr. Brinkley, A Man and His Calling
• Audio clip of Brinkley at Wfmu.org
• NPR's On the Media Story about Brinkley