Historians ponder the colorful career of John Brinkley, American quack
During the 1920s and ‘30s, John R. Brinkley was known throughout the Midwest for his powerful radio station (frequently broadcast at higher wattages than the law allowed), his barnstorming political campaigns, and, most of all, his surgical technique for transplanting the sex glands of male goats into men whose libidinal batteries had run down.
His Viagra avant la lettre won Brinkley many satisfied customers. Few worried that he was one of an estimated 25,000 medical practitioners who had purchased, not earned, their diplomas. As a book published at the height of his fame put it, Brinkley “could not be bound by the rigid artificial ethics of the American Medical Association.”
It was among the few unarguably true statements in Brinkley’s authorized (indeed, subsidized) biography: “The goat-gland doctor,” as he was known, could be as flexible with the facts as in his professional ethics.
But for historians interested in medical quackery, finding the truth about Brinkley involves more than cataloging the skeletons in his closet. In two books published within the last few months, scholars have re-examined the life and times of a man who prescribed drugs over the radio (collecting a modest kickback from participating pharmacies) and who very nearly got himself elected governor of Kansas.
“He’s a complex character,” says R. Alton Lee, a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Dakota. “I think he was as capable a surgeon as the average medical doctor of his time. It’s just that he turned his talents in the wrong direction.” In The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley (University Press of Kentucky), Mr. Lee treats him as an entrepreneurial genius.
The link between shady medical practitioners and populist ideology is the focus of Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (University Press of Kansas), by Eric S. Juhnke, an assistant professor of history at Briar Cliff University, in Sioux City, Iowa. For Brinkley’s rural (and sometimes impoverished) constituency, as Mr. Juhnke sees it, the hostility of established medical authorities only reinforced his appeal.
Prescriptions From the Underground
Neither Mr. Lee nor Mr. Juhnke hesitates to call Brinkley a con man. But each soon reveals a streak of ambivalence about him that verges on admiration. Mr. Juhnke says that Brinkley and the other quacks he analyzes “gave false reports about the success of their procedures, which is a telltale sign that something was not right. But psychosomatic medicine, the placebo effect, may have helped some people.”
Mr. Lee writes that Brinkley was “an excellent student of the psychology of aging and of both the male and female mind, a showman par excellence, brazen, crafty, arrogant, cunning, flamboyant, vain, paranoid, intelligent, and egocentric -- in short, a multifaceted person.”
Such respect for a quack’s overlooked virtues stands in stark contrast to the outlook of James Harvey Young, a professor emeritus of history at Emory University and the founding father of contemporary scholarship on medical fraud. In The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation (1961) and The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (1967), both published by Princeton University Press, Mr. Young chronicled the struggles of legitimate doctors and government agencies to wipe out the concoctions sold at traveling medical shows and other dubious treatments. Much of his research drew on the archives of the Food and Drug Administration. Mr. Young plainly shares the medical profession’s judgment of quacks as unscrupulous, deluded, or demented (or some combination thereof).
Mr. Lee and Mr. Juhnke both acknowledge Mr. Young’s groundbreaking work. But they offer a counternarrative -- medical history seen from the underground, where the quack and his customers do business.
“Brinkley was much more than ‘the goat-gland doctor,’” says Mr. Lee. Using papers deposited by Brinkley’s widow at the Kansas History Center, in Topeka, Mr. Lee traces the overlapping dimensions of the colorful fraud’s diversified business enterprises. At the center of it all was KFKB, in Milford, Kan., the fourth commercial radio station in the United States. Brinkley bought it in 1923 and rapidly built it into a regional presence. “In programming, Brinkley was a real pioneer,” says Mr. Lee. “Farmers appreciated the weather reports and his news about the markets in Chicago. He gave Western musicians like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hank Williams their start.” It was also the first station to offer college courses on the air, with lectures transmitted by telephone from what was then called Kansas State Agricultural College, in Manhattan.
Listeners across five states began to trust the medical advice Brinkley dispensed on his talk show -- so much so that doctors noticed a drop in business. He further antagonized the American Medical Association by saying that “AMA” really stood for the Amalgamated Meatcutters Association.
And, of course, he promoted the goat-gland operation. Those infomercials yielded an inadvertent public benefit, writes Mr. Lee: “Women surely appreciated his warning to husbands that their wives also had sexual needs, a topic that was not widely discussed at the time, even by doctors with their patients.”
In 1930, the authorities finally succeeded in withdrawing Brinkley’s medical and broadcasting licenses. In an effort to restore them, he twice ran for governor of Kansas. “He pioneered new political techniques, using the radio and a private airplane to reach voters around the state,” says Mr. Lee. “His rallies mixed elements of a fundamentalist revival meeting with the mood of a state fair, and the crowds were huge.”
He won nearly half the vote, not counting the 20,000 people who wrote him in for governor in neighboring Oklahoma. By 1933, he had settled in Del Rio, Tex., where he opened a successful hospital -- largely staffed by practitioners of questionable training -- and resumed broadcasting through a transmitter just across the Mexican border.
Where Mr. Lee treats Brinkley as a master of public relations who recognized the commercial and political importance of radio, Mr. Juhnke sees him as a man with a knack for anti-establishment rhetoric. He notes that the 240,000 votes Brinkley received in the 1932 election for governor of Kansas far exceeded the number of recipients of the goat-gland transplant.
Besides his genius for business, Brinkley “presented a vision of medicine that championed common Americans, denounced elitism, and affirmed rustic values.” He tapped into memories of the People’s Party -- a reform movement that electrified American politics during the 1890s, especially in the Midwest. While helping the region to enter the age of telecommunications, Brinkley also recognized the clash between small-town Midwestern values and the cold, impersonal quality of modern society. The hard times of the Dust Bowl and the Depression only strengthened the appeal of his populist message.
“You see that ideological legacy very clearly in his campaign for governor,” says Mr. Juhnke. “He positions himself as a champion of the downtrodden and the voiceless -- calling for drought prevention through public works to build lakes, free schoolbooks for the kiddies, and lower taxes. And his enemies are the ‘medical trust,’ whose monopoly he threatens.”
In parallel studies of Norman Baker and Harry Hoxsey, two doctors who claimed to have invented formulas that would cure cancer, Mr. Juhnke finds the same reliance on populist rhetoric, combining appeals to “the common man” with a deep suspicion of entrenched power.
It was an outlook with a dark side. Like the other quacks Mr. Juhnke examines, Brinkley blamed his troubles on Jewish doctors, and he donated money to the Silver Shirts, an American paramilitary organization modeled on Hitler’s storm troopers. When Brinkley died, in 1942, some of his political comrades were about to go on trial as Nazi sympathizers.
The Placebo Broadcasting System
Emory’s Mr. Young, now in his 80s, welcomes the two new books. He praises the detail of Mr. Lee’s biography and calls Mr. Juhnke’s volume “a major contribution to the study of health quackery in America.” But he also has reservations about treating figures like Brinkley as anything but a menace to society.
“I think the effort to link them to the overall thought of the Midwest, to populism, is a little strained,” he says. “Of course there are aspects that could be viewed that way. But it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t just as much quackery in other places.” (In fact, Hoxsey worked in Texas; but his rhetoric and his anti-Semitic political milieu overlapped with those of Brinkley and his colleague in Iowa, Baker.)
The notion that people embrace eccentric medical practices to defy the authority of highly educated professionals may appeal to scholars looking for signs of “subaltern resistance.” But it does not impress Mr. Young as a useful interpretation; he is fond of pointing out that university towns are hotbeds of quackery, and that some bogus treatments appeal mainly to fairly educated people. Anyone who has seen the “alternative health” gurus lecturing on PBS may suspect Mr. Young is on to something.
Differences of interpretation aside, all three scholars mention in passing that they have some personal link with the goat-gland doctor. “I grew up about 30 miles from Milford, Kan., where Brinkley first started,” says Mr. Lee. “As a little boy, I heard rumors -- he was somebody the adults talked about in whispers.” And while doing his research, Mr. Juhnke says, he picked up a piece of family lore: A great-uncle was said to have visited Brinkley for the Operation.
But Mr. Young’s link was the closest of all. In 1938, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he and some friends were listening to a broadcast in which Brinkley announced a contest for “the best description of the symptoms of the loss of manhood.” The winner would receive a free radio. “So I sat down and wrote one,” he says. Imitating the mail from listeners describing their symptoms that Brinkley frequently read on the air, Mr. Young fabricated a heart-rending account of impotence. “And three weeks later, the radio came in the mail.”
The letter had been a joke, and Mr. Young and his friends were afraid that keeping the radio might mean they had committed mail fraud. A meeting was arranged with the dean of the law school. “We told him the story,” Mr. Young recalls. “He roared with laughter and said, ‘Keep the radio!’”
It is a worthy footnote to the history of medical grift in America: the moment when a future scholar of quackery conned the greatest medical con man of all.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 16, Page A15
