To some he was a miraculous healer, to others a quack and a charlatan. He was an accidental pioneer in the early days of American radio broadcasting, but to most he’s remembered as the notorious ‘goat glands’ doctor. Dr John Romulus Brinkley was all these things and more, and his story throws light on the concept of xenotransplantation – the mixing of living cells, organs, or tissues between species – and how a conman can cash in on new – sometimes real, sometimes fake – medical developments to his own great advantage. Brinkley was a master of persuasion, in that he was able to make the population at large believe in his near-magic cure-all, using the power of developing mass media to reach a bigger audience than any tent show or medicine caravan could ever have hoped to. When his status was challenged, he turned to politics to try and save his reputation. Brinkley’s ‘goat gland’ transplants called upon the vigorous and lusty power of the Greek god Pan, the half-man, half-goat figure associated with sexual potency – the very thing Brinkley’s patients came to see him about.
TALKING BOLLOCKS
Brinkley was born illegitimate in 1885, the result of a liaison between his father, John Brinkley Sr., who’d been a self-taught medic for the Confederate States Army, and his wife Sarah’s 24-year-old niece. Brinkley was poorly educated, raised on medical texts and Bible stories, and married schoolfriend Sally Wike in January 1907. In an indication of things to come, the newly-weds toured rural towns posing as Quaker doctors selling ‘patent’ cure-alls. Brinkley learned the medicine caravan trade as apprentice to a Dr Burke who specialised in ‘virility’ tonics for ‘male problems’.
To bolster his credentials, Brinkley enrolled in an unaccredited medical college focused on herbal remedies (or ‘eclectic medicine’, as it was known). Settled in Chicago, Brinkley had three daughters with Sally, but theirs was a tempestuous union. While continuing his medical studies, Brinkley discovered a topic that fascinated him: glandular extracts and their effects on humans. Here was a career opportunity the ambitious conman could get behind.
Brinkley then bought a fake medical qualification from a ‘diploma mill’ based in Kansas. Whenthe two ‘doctors’ flee after just two months.
