Britons of pensionable age retain warm memories of the BBC radio doctor, Dr Charles Hill, who in the dark days of the 1940s addressed the Kitchen Front: ‘And now for prunes, those black-coated workers in the lower bowel.’ I doubt that Dr Hill would have been pleased to hear that he was following in the footsteps of another radio doctor who, not long before, had made a reputation of a different kind on the other side of the Atlantic.
Dr John Brinkley got his medical qualification from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, a notorious ‘diploma mill’ that, in exchange for $800, awarded him a degree that allowed him to practise medicine in Arkansas, Kansas, and a few other states. In 1917 he was town doctor in Milford, Kansas (population 200) when, so the story goes, an ageing farmer worried by his waning libido suggested that the doctor could ‘pep it up’ by giving him a couple of goat’s testicles. Brinkley at first laughed off the idea but then read how in France Dr Serge Voronoff was making a name, and a fortune, by implanting monkey glands into elderly men to restore their youthful potency. Brinkley decided to have a go and inserted slices of a goat’s testicles into the farmer’s scrotum. Two weeks later, his patient reported that his sex drive was restored and within a year he had fathered a son whom he unselfconsciously named Billy.
When the word got round, patients came to Brinkley from all over Kansas, each choosing the goat whose virility he wished to share from a herd in the doctor’s backyard. Such was the demand that Milford’s town doctor soon established the Dr Brinkley Clinic, which employed two other ‘diploma mill’ graduates, one of them Brinkley’s wife. His activities also attracted the attention of the American Medical Association (AMA) which, after Brinkley failed to produce any scientific data about his goat grafts, denounced his treatment as quackery and denied him membership of the Association.
Brinkley ignored the criticism and promoted his clinic, now known as the Kansas General Research Hospital, with a hard-selling national mailing campaign aimed at men over forty. He also planted newspaper stories that portrayed him as a medical maverick, a friend of the ageing American male, a victim of persecution by jealous conservative doctors, and a devout family man. He told interviewers that Saint Luke, apostle and doctor, must have also been a quack because he hadn’t belonged to the American Medical Association.
In 1923 Brinkley made his master move, starting the first radio station in Kansas – KFKB, ‘Kansas First, Kansas Best’ – on which he played the role of a kindly, ‘just a country boy at heart’ family doctor, a character that went down better with his rural audience than did the slick fast talk they heard on big-city stations. His audience didn’t mind, or even notice, if he pronounced words wrongly or seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, for that was exactly what they did.
KFKB’s transmissions reached far beyond Kansas and soon established a huge audience for programmes that mixed country music with fundamentalist sermons and lectures from the station owner on rejuvenation. Brinkley also used KFKB to attack more orthodox doctors. ‘Don’t let your doctor two-dollar you to death … come to Dr Brinkley.’ When listeners started to write for advice, he set up a regular item ‘The Medical Question Box’, in which he named the enquirers’ home towns, described their symptoms, and recommended treatment – usually one of the medicines he sold by mail order. He was soon receiving more than 3,000 letters a day, and magnanimously donated a new post office to Milford.
In 1929, KFKB won a gold cup as the most popular radio station in America and Brinkley was a rich man. He virtually owned Milford, which had expanded to accommodate the flow of visitors to his clinic. He bought a yacht and a private plane, and had friends in high places, including the Vice President of the United States, Charles Curtis.
He also had powerful enemies. The Kansas City Star ran an exposé on his clinic and Dr Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, denounced him for ‘blatant quackery’. Brinkley filed a libel suit against Fishbein but didn’t pursue it after he had squeezed as much publicity from it as he could.
In July 1930, Fishbein was a guest speaker at the annual convention of the Kansas Medical Society and, though he didn’t mention Brinkley by name, everyone knew to whom he referred when he described a typical charlatan as ‘a man who is likely to have a pleasing personality; a smooth tongue; able to present his case with eloquence. He will claim educational advantages he does not possess … always he will produce a large number of testimonials from the professional testimonial givers, or from persons who like to see their names in print … The charlatan of the worst type is the renegade physician. That man destroys public confidence in a profession. He destroys, but does not heal.’
There followed a raucous public rumpus. Brinkley defended himself with a massive propaganda campaign, stepping up his radio attacks on Fishbein and seeking to validate his treatment with testimonials from satisfied customers published in full-page newspaper advertisements. Yet, despite his huge expenditure of energy and money, the Kansas Supreme Court recommended that he lose his broadcasting licence. ‘The licensee has performed an organised charlatanism quite beyond the invention of the humble mountebank.’
Unfazed by this setback, Brinkley sold KFKB for $90,000 and moved to the sleepy town of Del Rio in Texas. Just across the border in Mexico, out of the range of American restriction, he built a more powerful transmitter than he’d had before. His new station expanded the KFKB mixture of weather, sermons and Brinkley’s promotional lectures, with performances from the stars of country music, singing cowboys, a Mexican orchestra and a bizarre collection of hucksters, cult leaders and fascist politicians who bought air time at premium rates to promulgate views that no one else would broadcast.
Brinkley closed the clinic in Milford, indeed razed it to the ground when the doctors working there decided to ‘go independent’, and moved his operation to Del Rio. There, the new Brinkley Rejuvenation Hospital brought prosperity even in the depths of the Depression. Shops, hotels and restaurants thrived on the stream of patients, their families and friends who were attracted by the perpetual summer of the West Texas climate. Brinkley soon launched two more radio stations and the Brinkley Branch Clinic in San Juan for the treatment of ‘piles, fistulas, colitis, and diseases of the female and male rectum’.
By the end of 1937, Brinkley’s businesses were said to be grossing $12 million a year. He owned real estate, including citrus groves and oil wells, a dozen Cadillacs, and three yachts, including the huge Dr Brinkley III, staffed by a 21-man crew. He prided himself that he was never seen in public undecorated with at least $100,000-worth of diamonds in the form of rings, tie clips and tie pins.
But by now his list of enemies included not just the Internal Revenue Service, which was after him for back taxes, but the US government, which was angered by the way he had flouted so many of its regulations and particularly irritated by the signal from his Mexican radio station, which was so powerful that it devoured everything in its path and could be heard in New York and Philadelphia, sometimes to the exclusion of all other channels.
In 1941, despite Brinkley’s lobbying of his friends in high places, the Mexican government yielded to pressure from the US and closed down his radio station. Three days later, Brinkley suffered a massive heart attack and, a month later, he was dead, destined to be remembered not as the first radio doctor but as radio’s greatest charlatan.