“How did the traffic get so jammed?” E.E. Cummings asks rhetorically in the 1926 poem, ‘XVIII.’ “Bedad it is the famous doctor who inserts monkeyglands in millionaires a cute idea n’est-ce pas?”
Three years later, actress Mary Eaton would warble, “Let me take you by the hand, over to the jungle band. If you're too old for dancing, get yourself a monkey gland.” It was one of two Irving Berlin-penned songs that found their way into The Marx Brothers’ pre-code comedy musical, The Cocoanuts.
For much of the 20s, French-born surgeon Serge Voronoff was something of a celebrity, as the pioneer of a procedure that represented the height of capitalist excess in those pre-Depression days. "[F]ashionable dinner parties and cracker barrel confabs,” renowned Chicago surgeon Max Thorek remarked, “as well as sedate gatherings of the medical élite, were alive with the whisper: 'Monkey Glands'."
Public interest was due, in no small part, to Voronoff’s monkey gonad-grafting performance in front of a packed Windy City crowd. Kansas resident John Brinkley traveled to Chicago in hopes of witnessing the surgery, only to be barred from entry by Thorek, his one-time teacher.
Brinkley, however, was a rising star in his own right. The son of a Confederate Army medic and his fifth wife, he was orphaned at age 10. Following a brief career as a telegrapher for Western Union and a hawker of patented medicine and other tonics, Brinkley enrolled at Chicago’s Bennett Medical College, only to be expelled from the school after failing to pay tuition. It was a small setback, quickly resolved by Kansas City Eclectic Medical University, a diploma mill that awarded him a fake degree.
Responding to a newspaper ad searching for a town doctor, Brinkley relocated to Milford, Kansas in late-1917. His clientele was largely comprised of local farmers, including one patient who complained that he was “a flat tire,” allegedly adding, “too bad I don’t have billy-goat nuts,” after staring longingly out the window at group of livestock.
Brinkley charged $750 for his goat gland surgery, quickly earning national attention when a patient’s wife gave birth to a son. A 1920 newspaper piece touted the arrival of “Billy,” the “First Goat-Gland Baby.” All press, however, was not good press. In 1924, both the St. Louis Star and Kansas City Post ran stories alleging quackery. That same year, Brinkley took the matter of media image into his own hands, launching KFKB (“Kansas' First, Kansas' Best”).
As the founder of one of the state’s first licensed stations, Brinkley became a pioneer in radio entertainment. Ads for his services evolved in radio medicine, as he diagnosed patients over the airwaves. His popularity grew in several states, coupled with an onslaught of promotional stunts, including the sponsorship of Milford baseball team, the Brinkley Goats. In a moment of personal vindication, Brinkley would also be given his own Chicago demonstration, transplanting goat glands into 34 patients in front of a rapt crowd.
It was a series of exposes in The Kansas City Star that marked the beginning of the end of Brinkley’s medical practice in America. “I have gone into homes and found men bedridden, ruined by the bungling butchery of this man Brinkley,” a reporter wrote. The paper would dig up 42 death certificates signed by the surgeon, a revelation that culminated with the stripping of his medical license in the state in 1930.
Three days later, Brinkley kicked off a campaign to become the Governor of Kansas. Seeking a position that would allow him to appointment members to the state medical board, he had a powerful tool in the form of his own massively popular radio station. Six months later, however, he lost his broadcasting license, after the Federal Radio Commission found that his station broadcast obscenities and offered more advertising than actual programming.
Adding insult to injury, his own medical show was ruled "contrary to the public interest” by the commission. Running as a write-in candidate, Brinkley would lose the election to Democrat Harry H. Woodring. Two years later, both Brinkley and Woodring would both lose to Alf Landon in a three-way race. In 1936, Landon would become the Republican nominee for President.
Brinkley moved his radio — and medical — career to Mexico, launching XER, a one million watt station with a signal so powerful, it could be heard on bedsprings, fences and dental work. Earning the nickname, "Hillbilly Hollywood,” the station (and its successor, XERA) became an early booster of country music, helping advance the careers of Gene Autry, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.
Brinkley continued practicing medicine in Mexico until the late-30s, when a series of lawsuits put him in the hole to the tune of millions. He declared bankruptcy in 1941, and soon after the Federal Government investigated him over allegations of mail fraud. He suffered three heart attacks and had a leg amputated before dying the following year.
The one-time goat gland doctor was buried in Memphis, a large statue of “Winged Victory” placed atop a marble column to mark his final resting place. In a final act of humiliation, grave robbers performed their own botched surgery, slicing the winged woman from the top of the structure.
Only her foot remains.
Sources:
The Bizarre History of a Bogus Doctor Who Prescribed Goat Gonads https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/07/documentary-interview-medicine-science/
John R. Brinkley
https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/john-r-brinkley/11988
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