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Dr. John R. Brinkley and the Goat Gland Transplant

Writer: FibonacciMD
FibonacciMD
9 hours ago
10 min read

Updated: 7 hours ago

The Wild Story of America's Most Notorious Medical Conman


Dr John R. Brinkley conman scammer
Dr. John R. Brinkley

Some lives are so colorful that their biographies read like fiction.  John R. Brinkley lived one of those lives.  An elderly farmer walked into a small-town Kansas clinic in 1918 and complained that he could not father another child.  The doctor, half-joking, told him goats never seem to have this problem.  The farmer, apparently serious, asked if he could get a pair of goat testicles.  That conversation, and the surgery that followed it, helped make John Brinkley a multimillionaire.  Over the course of his life, he also became a famous radio personality, owned one of the most powerful radio towers in the world, nearly got elected governor of Kansas, kidnapped his own daughter, committed bigamy, and ran a fraudulent "electric medicine" scam out of a South Carolina storefront.  This is the story of how he got away with his scams for almost thirty years, and the moment it finally caught up with him. 


Brinkley's Chaotic Personal Life

Born in 1885 to a poor family in rural North Carolina, Brinkley was orphaned at an early age.  He lived with relatives, finished school at age 16, and worked as a mail carrier before becoming a telegraph operator for Western Union in New York. 


He married his childhood friend, Sally Wike, in 1907, and the couple spent a short time performing in traveling medical shows and selling patent medicines before he enrolled in medical school.  Around 1910, Sally left him, filed for divorce, and took their two-year-old daughter with her.  In response, Brinkley kidnapped the child and fled with her to Canada.  Unable to secure an extradition order, Sally eventually dropped the kidnapping charges and divorce proceedings.  The couple briefly reconciled, but she left him for good in 1913.


That same year, Brinkley moved to Memphis and married Minerva Telitha "Minnie" Jones just four days after meeting her, committing bigamy, since he had not yet divorced Sally.  


Brinkley Becomes a Doctor

Brinkley had always wished to become a doctor, and in 1907, he enrolled at Bennett Medical College in Chicago.  It was an unaccredited medical school, as were many schools of that era, and it taught eclectic medicine, which combined conventional medical training with botanical and herbal remedies.  Unable to continue paying for school, he left after two years and returned to North Carolina to begin working as an “undergraduate physician,“ a term then used for someone practicing medicine without having completed a conventional medical degree.  


After his wife left him in 1913, he and James E. Crawford, who used the alias J. W. Burks, established the "Greenville Electro Medic Doctors" in Greenville, South Carolina.  They placed advertisements targeting men who were concerned about their “manly vigor.” They injected colored water into their patients for $25 a session (about $843 now), telling them it was Salvarsan*, or "electric medicine from Germany."  After about two months, they fled town with the local newspaper reporting that about 30 to 40 merchants had been left with unpaid bills.  *(Although they called their treatment Salvarsan as part of this scam, it was actually the name of an early effective anti-syphilis drug developed in Germany.) 


On his honeymoon with Minnie, Brinkley was arrested and sent back to Greenville for practicing medicine without a license and writing bad checks.  He provided information about where Crawford was, and Crawford was later arrested as well.  The two men met again in jail, agreed to settle their debts, and were released with Brinkley getting some financial help from his new father-in-law.


Minnie and John Brinkley then moved to Arkansas, where he took over the practice of a doctor who was moving out of state.  With the money he made, he was eventually able to pay off his outstanding tuition at Bennett Medical College.  Bennett released his transcript, allowing him to obtain his medical degree at the Eclectic Medical College of Kansas City, widely regarded as a diploma mill.  He graduated in 1914, and his diploma helped him qualify to practice medicine in a number of states.  


He worked as a doctor briefly in a few places and then served in the Army Reserve Medical Corps during World War I, where according to records, he was hospitalized for “nervous exhaustion” after a few days of duty and discharged a month later.  After the Army, Brinkley moved to Milford, Kansas, in response to an advertisement for a doctor.  It was there that his life took another bizarre turn. 


The Goat Testicle Transplant Scam

At his clinic in Milford, Brinkley reportedly took good care of his patients during the 1918 influenza pandemic.  However, that year, an elderly farmer came in who was having trouble fathering another child.  Brinkley, who had long marveled at the health and virility of goats, joked that the patient would have no problem if he had goat glands, and somehow from there they eventually agreed that Brinkley would implant a portion of a goat's testicle into the man, with the patient supplying the goat.  The procedure involved placing a piece of goat testicular tissue in the man's scrotum, but Brinkley did not connect it to the patient's blood vessels.**  The transplanted tissue could not function as a working testicle and would eventually be rejected or absorbed by the body. The farmer apparently believed the implant had been successful, although any perceived benefit was more likely attributable to a placebo effect.

Dr. John R Brinkley operating on a goat glad transplant scam - goat testicular tissue
John R. Brinkley performing surgery with Minnie assisting 

Word rapidly spread, and Brinkley’s next patient asked for goat testicular tissue to be implanted in him and goat ovarian tissue into his wife for fertility issues.  Within a year, that couple fortuitously had a son, Billy, whose birth Brinkley used for publicity purposes to promote his business.  Brinkley eventually expanded the indications for the procedure to conditions beyond impotence and infertility, including ailments such as high blood pressure and mental illness.

Dr. John R. Brinkley ad for Kansas Surgeon uses goat glant to cure sterility

The story caught the attention of J. J. Tobias, chancellor of the Chicago Law School, who traveled to Milford for the surgery.  He later wrote,  “I was an old man… And seven days later I left the hospital feeling twenty-five years younger.”  After obtaining a 30-day California medical permit, Brinkley went to Los Angeles at the invitation of Harry Chandler, owner of both the Los Angeles Times and the city’s first radio station, to operate on him and some of his editors.  Chandler later praised the procedure publicly.  He reportedly also performed the surgery on some Hollywood stars.  As a result of testimonials from prominent and famous people, requests for the surgery skyrocketed, allowing him to command a fee of $750 (about $12,500 today) for each procedure, and he built his own hospital.  He also traveled extensively, both in the United States and internationally, to perform surgeries. 


(** Later in his career, Brinkley offered a higher-priced version of the surgery claiming he could attach nerves and blood vessels to the goat tissue, but medical observers noted that he merely inserted some tissue without making any functional anatomical connections.)


His KFKB Radio Station

He soon became both famous and wealthy.  After seeing Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles radio station in 1923, he built KFKB in Milford.  Due to his programming abilities and his twice-daily medical broadcasts called the Medical Question Box, KFKB became one of America’s most listened-to radio stations.  He promoted both his medical practice and patent medicines he was selling on the radio, eventually amassing an estimated $12 million fortune (about $230 million today). 


The Medical Establishment and Press Take Notice

As Brinkley’s fame grew, so did scrutiny of his background and medical practice. Newspapers began publishing negative reports about Eclectic medical schools, including those Brinkley had attended, exposing the practice of selling medical degrees and lax attendance requirements.  


When he applied for a permanent California medical license, it came out that one of his medical diplomas had been purchased and was dated earlier than it had actually been obtained.  California tried to extradite Brinkley for practicing medicine without a valid license, but the governor of Kansas, a friend of Brinkley’s, refused to honor the extradition request.  He also had his Connecticut medical license revoked. 


Closer to home, The Kansas City Star newspaper published stories on Brinkley’s questionable practices, which included accounts from a growing number of dissatisfied patients.


His most persistent critic was Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), who was on a crusade against medical quackery.  He wrote in JAMA that Brinkley had falsely claimed to be attending medical school while actually being in another city and later described him as “a charlatan of the rankest sort” whose radio station was being used to “victimize people and to enrich himself.”


In 1930, mounting evidence and negative publicity led the Kansas Medical Board to investigate Brinkley, ultimately revoking his Kansas medical license for “gross immorality” and “unprofessional conduct.”


Brinkley Runs for Governor 

There was an outpouring of support for him and, five days after losing his medical license, Brinkley decided to run for governor as an independent write-in candidate on a platform of “fearlessness, independence, [and] sympathy for the masses.”  He received about 30% of the votes and narrowly lost by about 34,000 votes in a three-way race.  He actually might have won, but to block him from winning, election authorities ruled that write-in ballots would only count if his name was written exactly as “J.R. Brinkley,” which disqualified an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 votes.


In 1930, his radio station’s license was revoked, in part because of broadcasts considered obscene (he did talk about sexual issues) and because the Medical Question Box  was deemed “contrary to the public interest.”  In 1932, he ran again for governor, receiving close to a third of the votes.   

Dr John R Brinkley runs for governor

The Move to Texas

Capitalizing on a still-valid Texas medical license, Brinkley moved to Del Rio in 1932-33 and opened a new practice.  He also constructed a powerful radio station, XER, just across the Rio Grande in Mexico, which allowed it to be beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators.  The radio station, known as a “border blaster,” could be heard anywhere in the U.S. and 15 other countries.  He later increased its signal strength, making it one of the most powerful radio stations in the world at the time.  He would sometimes perform his radio shows from Texas calling into the Mexican radio station.  Congress passed a bill in 1934, known popularly as the “Brinkley Act,” which prohibited telephone transmission of programming to foreign radio stations.  


He no longer performed goat testicle transplants but started a new scam offering unilateral vasectomies as a supposed treatment for prostate problems.  As part of the treatment, he prescribed six injections of “Formula 1020,” which analysis reportedly found to be little more than water containing blue dye.  With the practice and the radio station, he was reportedly making $1 million a year.  However, patient complaints started to rise, his practice started to collapse, and he left Texas in 1938. 


The Fishbein Libel Trial 

Dr. Morris Fishbein puts a spotlight on the conman John R Brinkley
Dr. Morris Fishbein

His next stop in 1938 was Little Rock, Arkansas, where he re-established his medical practice.  However, Morris Fishbein was still crusading against him.  Fishbein wrote an article in that same year denouncing him, stating, “In John R. Brinkley, quackery reaches its apotheosis.  He continues to demonstrate his astuteness in shaking shekels from the pockets of credulous Americans,” adding that he had “consummate gall beyond anything revealed by any other charlatan.”


Brinkley was incensed and sued Fishbein for libel.  At that trial in Texas, Fishbein’s lawyer got Brinkley to admit under oath that he knew the goat testicle operation “did not and could not rejuvenate a man by itself” and that his advertisements claiming this ability were false.  Fishbein’s attorney also stated that “Dr. Brinkley is the foremost money-making surgeon in the world because he had sense enough to know the weaknesses of human nature and gall enough to make a million dollars a year out of it.”  The jury returned a verdict in Fishbein’s favor, which Brinkley appealed.  The appellate court found that “the plaintiff by his methods violated acceptable standards of medical ethics…the plaintiff should be considered a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well-understood meaning of those words.” 


The End of the Trail

With his reputation in ruins, numerous malpractice lawsuits stemming from his previous surgeries were filed against him, seeking more than $3 million in damages.  His radio station was confiscated by the Mexican government, and he declared bankruptcy in January 1941.  In September of that year, he, his wife and six others were indicted on mail-fraud charges involving the use of the U.S. Postal Service to promote fraudulent diagnoses and treatments.  While the others pleaded no contest, Brinkley wished to go to trial, but died on May 26, 1942 before the trial could take place.


The medical profession at the beginning of the 20th century was somewhat like the Wild West.  A charismatic conman like John Brinkley was able to make a fortune preying on vulnerable patients because regulation, medical education, licensing, advertising, and scientific standards were still developing. 


Fortunately, principled physicians like Morris Fishbein and medical organizations increasingly recognized that the time had come to reform American medical practice.  Although Brinkley was never held criminally accountable for most of his fraudulent activities, he died bankrupt, with a reputation as one of history’s most notorious medical charlatans.


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If you liked this article, you may also find this article interesting about other medical conmen in The History of “Snake Oil” and “Snake Oil Salesmen” .

Here are more fascinating topics in the FibonacciMedicine history of medicine series:

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References

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