Goats & Sheep

THE ROGUISH WORLD OF DOCTOR BRINKLEY (280 pp.)--Gerald Carson--Rinehart ($4.95).

It may be, as the late William Allen White observed while discussing the villain of this biography, that 20% of the people are permanently gullible. And it may be that White's figure is low. John R. Brinkley, a small, dapper, goateed North Carolinian, who seemed certain that society rests upon a thick substratum of cement-heads, combined elements of the demagogue and the religious faker, but above all he was a medical quack--perhaps the greatest quack ever to barter colored water for cash. Author Carson tells the story in a slapdash, cornball style that suits his subject well.

At the peak of his incredible career in the 19205, Brinkley owned three yachts (one of which was 150 feet long and shipped a pipe organ), the most powerful radio station on earth, quantities of snazzy real estate, diamonds large enough to be used for fish-line sinkers, and any number of imaginatively colored limousines. In 1930 he decided, a couple of months before Election Day, to run for the governorship of Kansas (he promised a lake in each county), and his write-in campaign might well have succeeded had not the Republican and Democratic ballot counters joined hands against him.

Testimonial for Billy. Brinkley began his quackery as a humble "Quaker doctor," a species of tonic peddler who "thee'd" and "thou'd" dollars out of rubes' back pockets--and, naturally, had no connection with the Society of Friends. He learned early the bases of his calling--how to exploit hypochondria, and how to aggravate the bone-bred dislike of the ignorant for honest physicians ("Don't let your doctor two-dollar you to death," he was to thunder later on).

When Brinkley drifted to tiny Milford, Kansas in 1917, his assets were a sheepskin from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City (a diploma mill), a membership in the Masons, and a Saxon Six automobile. Then a rustic came to Brinkley with the complaint that he was a "flat tire," sexually inert. Somehow, Brinkley hit on the idea of implanting a fragment of goat gonad in the old fellow's testicles. He did, and before long the patient had recuperated to the extent that he was able to sire a healthy son--a lad named, appropriately enough, Billy.

Pick Your Operation. Brinkley called his operation a graft. It was. of course, merely a swindle. But goat glands caught on. There were difficulties at first; it developed that glands from Angora goats gave patients an enduring stench, so stinkless Toggenberg goats were used. Brinkley showed flair approaching genius by allowing his suckers to choose their own goats, much in the manner, as the author observes, as one could pick his own lobster at a Maine shore restaurant. Later, the goat doctor refined his pitch: "Operations performed according to your selection; you pay only for what you choose." The suckers hobbled in, and the money, at $750 for the standard implanting operation, began to pile up. The "doctor" began to dress like a swell, circumcised the Prince of Siam while touring the Far East, and sponsored a baseball team called the Brinkley Goats.

In 1923, Brinkley cannily secured a license to operate a powerful radio station, KFKB (for "Kansas First, Kansas Best"). Taking the air between concerts by hillbilly bands and sessions by the "Tell Me a Story Lady," Brinkley read sermons, pitched hard for goat glands, and made "snapshot diagnoses" of the ailments of his correspondents. "Now here is a letter from a dear mother," he would croon, "a dear little mother who holds to her breast a babe of nine months. She should take Number 2 and Number 16 and--yes--Number 17 and she will be helped." Brinkley got $1 a bottle from each of the hundreds of druggists who peddled his prescriptions.

Bankruptcy in a Cadillac. Tardily, the authorities awoke to Brinkley, and by the early 19303 he had been stripped of his license to practice medicine in Kansas. Unperturbed, he hired other medics to do his cutting, and piped his radio medicine show to XER, in Mexico near Del Rio, Texas. Brinkley tried twice more to become Governor of Kansas, and in 1940 let it be known that he had received 500,000 letters urging him to run for President as the Republican candidate. But by the end of the decade, the enthusiasm for goat glands had subsided (although Brinkley made $810,000 in 1939). He lost a libel suit against his archenemy, the A.M.A.'s Dr. Morris Fishbein. The goat doctor retired from quackery, and in 1941, after prudently shifting most of his wealth to his wife and friends, declared bankruptcy. Sadly he told the court: "I don't think there is but two Cadillacs left."

One year later, he was dead of a heart ailment. Dr. Fishbein had already written his obituary: "Centuries to come may never produce again such blatancy, such fertility of imagination or such ego."

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