colored water into their posteriors. They called the treatment electric medicine and claimed it came from Germany. The two men skipped town a few months later to avoid those who figured out their scam. After running out of money, Brinkley found a newspaper ad looking for a doctor in Kansas, in a town called Milford with a population of just 200 people. So he and his wife Minnie moved to Milford to open up a doctor’s office and drugstore.[10]
The couple were barely making ends meet when a 46-year-old farmer named Bill Stittsworth came into their office. Stittsworth said he and his wife had been unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant for 16 years. “I’m a flat tire,” he told the Brinkleys. Then Stittsworth looked out the window at a nearby farm and observed, “Too bad I don’t have billy goat nuts.” You see, billy goats are known to be some of the healthiest, most fertile animals on the planet. The farmer knew firsthand a goat’s appetite for sex was famous.[11]
No one really knows exactly what happened next. Brinkley claims the farmer begged him to try an experimental procedure using goat glands. The farmer’s family claims Brinkley paid Stittsworth to experiment on him. Regardless of whose idea it was, a few nights later both men were back in the office prepping for a unique surgical procedure. Brinkley slit the farmer’s scrotum, after which he reached for two goat testicles that were sitting on a small silver tray, implanted a goat testis on each side of the scrotum, and sutured them to the loose tissue. Stittsworth had his man parts sewn up and the whole ordeal was over in 15 minutes.[12]
Two weeks later the farmer showed up and told Brinkley the good news – his wife was finally pregnant! They named their child Billy, after a goat, of course. The second couple who conceived a child after having the goat gland surgery named their child Charles Darwin Mellinger, in honor of science of all things. Brinkley unwittingly stumbled onto a genius marketing campaign for the rural population in a small Kansas town. The goat gland surgery became an instant hit. His operation became so personalized he would even let the patients select their own goat from his backyard. Brinkley was averaging 50 procedures a month in no time, at $750 a pop (a lot of money for the 1920s and around $9,000 in today’s dollars). Eventually he began implanting goat ovaries in women as well, to double his clientele.[13]
Spoiler alert: Implanting goat testicles into men’s scrotums is not a scientifically backed procedure. Most people didn’t stop to think about how insane this was at the time because they were desperate. A few weeks after his first goat gland transplant, Brinkley told a classroom full of other doctors, “I have a scheme up my sleeve and the whole world will hear of it.” The way he was going to get the whole world to hear about his plan was through a brand-new technology that would take his operation to the next level.
Radio
Radio was an entirely new medium for the mainstream public in the 1920s. It not only allowed broadcasters to reach large groups of people all at once across the country, it also allowed them to capture people’s attention in their own homes. Radio was truly one of the first technological breakthroughs that allowed families to have leisure time with one another in their own living rooms where they didn’t have to pay attention to one another.
Companies began advertising their products in the late nineteenth century, but the 1920s is when advertising exploded into popular culture. The radio had a great deal to do with its spread. The first commercial radio station was launched in 1920. By the end of the decade, radio penetration went from basically zero to close to 40% of households. By 1940, more than 80% of households had a radio. The adoption of radios in households was faster than electricity, automobiles, or the telephone. Comedian George Burns wrote in his biography, “It’s impossible to explain the impact the radio had on the world to anyone who didn’t live through that time.”[14]
Radio sales doubled in 1923, and then tripled from there by 1924. The biggest reason radio spread like wildfire is because it was free. There was nothing else to pay for once you purchased it. And the reason it was free is because the business model was predicated on advertising. The swift rise in radio ownership coincided perfectly with Brinkley’s rise to prominence as a healer of all things to all people with ailments. Brinkley was a world-class charlatan, but according to one media historian he was also, “the man who, perhaps, more than any other, foresaw the great potentialities of radio as an advertising medium.”[15]
Advertising these days is everywhere you look. It’s on the websites, social media, billboards, TV, radio, and podcasts. But advertising wasn’t always so ingrained in our lives. When the radio went mainstream in the 1920s and revolutionized how we communicate with large groups of people, it was controversial to advertise on the platform. In 1922, future president Herbert Hoover even said, “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned out in advertising chatter.”[16]
Brinkley saw the future well before many businesses and invested heavily into radio to spread his message. By 1923, tiny Milford, Kansas had the fourth largest radio station in the country. How did Brinkley pull off this feat? He was essentially the Dr. Ruth of his day, talking about sex on the radio, something that was a taboo subject at the time. He also used radio as a sales tactic for his services and the new line of “medicine” he created. The radio show he produced was basically the WebMD of the early twentieth century. People would write in questions about their illness or injury, which Brinkley would read aloud on his show. Prescriptions were then given on air, which listeners could then go buy from the more than 500 drugstores he developed relationships with all over the country.[17]
No self-respecting doctor would hand out prescriptions without first examining the patient and making a diagnosis, but Brinkley wasn’t trying to appeal to reason: he was trying to appeal to people’s worst fears. Snake oil salesmen had always targeted people’s emotions, and Brinkley was no different. Now he had the ability to do so on a massive scale. This entailed not only promoting his goat gland operation, but an entire line-up of healthcare products and services.
The Kansas State Medical Board eventually revoked his medical license on the grounds of “gross immorality and unprofessional conduct.” The Kansas City Star proclaimed: “The superquack of Milford is finished.”[18]
Narrator: He was not finished.
The Placebo Effect
Morris Fishbein, an actual physician with morals who worked with the AMA, had made it his life’s work to take down hucksters and quacks, and the man at the top of his list was John Brinkley. Fishbein knew Brinkley’s ruse couldn’t last forever. The goat gland procedure was completely fabricated. There wasn’t an ounce of scientific or biological proof it could work.
The question you’re probably asking yourself is this: How the hell did it actually work for those farmers who went through this painful procedure? It could have been due to the placebo effect, but the true answer is likely simple regression to the mean. Most sick people tend to get better. In fact, it’s estimated that four out of every five physical ailments will heal themselves.[19] So even the biggest quack in the world could “heal” most patients through the passage of time or dumb luck. Unfortunately, it was those patients who came to Brinkley in dire need of treatment who suffered the most.
The Kansas Medical Board proved that at least 42 people Brinkley treated (some of whom were not sick before he treated them) had died after undergoing one of his operations or medicine programs. This number is significantly higher than almost any serial killer in history. At least six of those people had undergone the goat gland transplant. Not only was Brinkley performing medical procedures with no scientific reasoning behind them, but he would often treat patients while drunk. One patient claimed
