Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Goat Testicle Implanting Doctor Who Invented Talk Radio

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

In episode 65, Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss John Brinkley, who was obsessed with goat testicles.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? Lubin my Slippin' Slides! I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Vasters, the show where every week I talk about a new terrible person and try a new terrible introduction to try and get a reaction from my guests. Caitlin Durante, how are you feeling about that one? Who's lubin' up your Slippin' Slide? Is that what you said? Yeah, that was the intro.

Well, I liked it. To me, whoever's lubing up your Slippin' Slide is a good person because you want your Slippin' Slide nice and lubed. Oh yeah, otherwise you'll get some real bad tears. Yeah, you don't want those tears, those Slippin' Slide tears. So you're going to want that lube. But I still want to know who is doing it. Okay, so you're asking me who lubes my Slippin' Slide?

It's more like a question I'm asking the universe. Aren't we all wondering on some level what's lubing our Slippin' Slides? I want to tell you specifically who is lubing my Slippin' Slide though. Just kidding, but it is Nicholas Holt's star of some movies. Mad Max Fury Road. Mad Max, yep. Tolkien, which I won't see. Actually, I will anyway.

In a way, Nicholas Holt is lubing all of our Slippin' Slides. I think that's beyond a doubt. You're not wrong. I'm not wrong. So, Caitlin, I've already introduced you by name, but you want to plug some plugables before we get into the episode today? I'd love to. I'm a comedian.

I am the co-host of the Bechtelcast, which is another podcast right here on this darn network. And yeah, that's about it. And you were with me to talk about Elron Hubbard last year. Yes. It was a good time talking about that. Loved it. And now we're talking about a different, but almost as ambitious grifter. Oh, I love the ambitious ones.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this guy, motherfucking ambition coming out the wazoo. Out of his Slippin' Slide. That is beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yeah, if ambition was a Slippin' Slide, this guy would be lubing that Slippin' Slide up like you would not believe. Right on. Right on. Have you ever heard of John Brinkley?

I have not. Have you ever heard of goat testicles? Just as a general thing? Yeah, as a concept, as a thing that exists. I am familiar with testicles and goats. And by proxy, I am familiar with the idea that goats would have testicles, some of them. Now, and I understand you're not going to have an exact number here, Caitlin, but would you venture to guess how many times you've heard the phrase goat testicles in your life up to this point, not counting the two times I've brought it up so far?

I would say exactly that phrase, or even just a variation on goat balls or goat nuts. Any sort of direct reference to the testicular glands of a goat? Honestly, it's more than you think, because if memory serves, goats have enormous testicles in relation to their body. They're pretty sizable. So I feel like I've been to different petting zoos and people have commented on goat balls, so I feel like I've heard some variation on it maybe ten times throughout my life. Ten times? Yeah. If that's the case, then I suspect for you and for most of our listeners, you are about to hear the phrase goat testicles more than you've ever heard it before in your entire life.

Great. Yeah, I'm very excited for this. John Romulus Brinkley came into this world on July 8th in the year of our lord, 1885. His father, John Richard Brinkley, was a former medic in the Confederate army. His mother, Sarah Burnett, was the niece of his dad's fourth wife, which is a chain of parentage that is best not contemplated too deeply. When John was five, his mother died. His father died when he was ten, and John was raised by his aunt Sally. He grew up in Jackson County, North Carolina, and seems to have been a rather ambitious child.

He recalled later that he grew up dreaming of John Brinkley freeing the slaves, John Brinkley illuminating the world, John Brinkley facing an assassin's bullet for the sake of his people, John Brinkley healing the sick. Can I stop you right there? Yes. I'm sorry. His middle name is Romulus? Mm-hmm. Okay. That?

Like the guy who killed his brother to make Rome. Okay. For some reason, I am like, oh, that's a Star Trek thing? I don't know enough about history as you can tell. It's possible that they were just anticipating Star Trek's second or third best villain species, but more likely it was a reference to Roman mythology. Okay. I suppose that tracks. Yeah.

I would say that's more likely. Okay. His neighbors recall him being, quote, kind of a reckless-like boy who was lively as a cricket because, again, it was old timey days and people said shit like lively as a cricket. Yeah. John's education was not up to snuff with his ambitions. By the age of 16, he'd been forced to leave school and get a job. He worked first as a mailman and then as a telegraph operator. This job moved him to New York and then to New Jersey.

It seemed like he was on the path for a decent middle-class life, but then, at age 21, his aunt-mom Sally died and he was forced to return to Jackson County to settle her affairs. Mm-hmm. Wait, his aunt-mom, right? Yeah, I mean, his aunt who raised him. Oh, okay. She's his aunt-mom. Okay. I was still a little confused on who his relatives are and how much incest did happen.

Well, it's confusing because his actual mom is the niece of his dad's wife, his dad's ex-wife, which I think makes his real mom his aunt-mom too. So it's confusing. Yes, I'm not going to try to understand it. It's best not to try to parse that out too deeply. Yeah, okay. Now, while he was back in Jackson County dealing with his second aunt-mom's funeral, he met an old friend from school named Sally Wilk. Now that they were both mature adults, they started viving off one another and then fucking, and then one month after Aunt Sally's death, they got married. Wife Sally understood her husband's unrequited ambition to get into medicine. She told him that he didn't need to waste a bunch of time in medical school to become a doctor.

Agreed. And this was true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the late 1890s, every state government, save three in the United States, had repealed licensing laws for doctors. This was due to a populist movement that had swept the country against the idea of highfalutin educations and licenses, things that were seen as taking power from the common man. The way many people felt, why shouldn't anyone be able to declare themselves a doctor for any reason? So that's sort of where things were in the late 90s. You're down with that? I'm down with that. Too much education out there. Let's scale it back. I'm having a bunch of hats printed up right now that just say, make every American a doctor again.

I think that'll deal with the problem of not enough good jobs and the student loan problem. Maybe like a silver bullet for a couple of like our healthcare crisis, our debt crisis, just make everybody a doctor. Right. I have so much student loan debt and I need so much medical attention and I don't know what to do about any of it. Well, and Caitlin, I don't know how much student loan debt you have, but if you look at whatever that number is and then declare yourself a doctor, I'm going to bet it seems a lot more reasonable. That's true because if I have the income of a doctor, you know, $70,000 that I owe, that's pocket change for a doctor. That's nothing. Yeah. A shitty doctor will make twice that in a year. This is a solid plan. Yes.

Anyway, at around this point in the late 1890s, a teacher named Limuo Shaduck was asked by the Massachusetts state legislature to carry out a survey of the state sanitary and medical facilities during this period. His summary of the state of Massachusetts sanitary facilities is pretty accurate for sort of the state of medical education in most of the US at the time. Quote, anyone male or female, learned or ignorant, an honest man or a nave can assume the name of physician and practice upon anyone to cure or to kill as either may happen without accountability. It's a free country. Wait, to cure or to kill. Yeah. Okay. Good.

So doctors, our response should be killing people is what they're saying. Doctors shouldn't be held to a high standard of not killing people. They should be able to do whatever they want because anyone should be a doctor. Yes. This is a real thing that was a popular line of thought in America at the time. Good. Okay. Now, John Brinkley, yeah, pretty presently with his, his new wife's advice became Dr. John Brinkley. Now, this was not, he was not a doctor, obviously any like licensed sense of the word. Sure. But he started traveling around and acting as what was known as a Quaker doctor. This was sort of a meme in America at this point. And I'm going to quote from the book charlatan by Pope Brock to explain what exactly was going on there.

Okay. Quote, there was a set pattern to most Quaker doctor shows. First, a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd warmed up. A short morality play followed in which a noble head of house or ringleted female died pathetically for lack of a miracle tonic identified by name. Finally, the physician himself, Brinkley, shot on stage in a dinner plate hat, cut away coat and pious pants that buttoned up the sides. Being and vowing, singing and selling, waving a bottle of Irish cathartic pills or maybe Burdock blood bitters or Aunt Fanny's worm candy. One thing was for sure. Whatever it was cured, whatever you had. Okay, wait. So you've got a warm up comic. You've got a feature and you've got a headliner. Okay. A headliner is pretending to be a Quaker doctor who sells you a nonsense medicine. And no matter what you have and no matter what's being hawked at the people, it works and it's a cure all. I mean, that's some. Okay, I like that. I like that they pretty much, you know, just, I mean, they're like, this is a stand up show. And it's going to be packed as shit, but it's going to people are going to love it sounds.

And it's one of those things were like back in back in those days, there wasn't TV, there wasn't even radio. There was fucking nothing to do for most people. So like some fake doctor comes to town and puts on a show. Maybe you buy his pills just because it's a distraction. I mean, he's, he's selling merch. He's like, here's my show merch. Here's the merch that you saw in the show. I mean, brilliant. Good, good business plan. I love it. Yes. Solid branding. Yeah. Now, this was obviously what we would call snake oil selling like your brinkly was a snake oil salesman. Have you ever wondered where the term snake oil comes from, Caitlin? Well, I haven't wondered that only because I'm not, I don't know if I've ever heard that before. If I have like a snake oil. Yeah, I don't know. I'm again, I don't know what Romulus is and I don't know what snake oil is. I'm an idiot. Well, snake oil salesman is a common term for like somebody who sells bogus, like people call Alex Jones a snake oil salesman because he sells his brain pills that are full of lead and stuff. Right. And the term came, was coined in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was, would have been when Brinkley was about eight years old. And it came when a man wearing a cowboy costume got on stage and started strangling dozens of rattlesnakes to death and collecting the liquid that oozed out of them and selling it as a medicine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's literally where the term snake oil salesman comes from.

I mean, it's a very literal thing. Yeah. Just a man strangling snakes. And getting the oil from the snakes. You know, in terms of our previous conversation about like these shows as entertainment, I would absolutely watch a man dressed as a fucking cowboy strangling snakes on stage. And collecting the ooze? And not he gets bit. Yeah. Yeah. That's a show. Hell yeah. Yes. Oh, I kind of want to see Pat and Oswald do that.

Right. Why isn't Kevin Hart, my favorite comedian, JK, strangling snakes on stage? Well, and the great thing about most standup comedians is that I wouldn't really care if they are the snakes one. Like either way, I'm going to get a good show. Exactly. Yeah. Like carrot top. Right. Most comedians probably should get bitten a little bit by a snake, including me. I need to, you know, to get in check, I need to be bitten by a snake. Now, Caitlin, how many rattlesnakes do you think you could throttle if your career was on the line?

Sophie is helping me out and saying four. Four? Yeah. That's a pretty good number of snakes. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That's solid. I think Sophie has a lot of confidence in you. Thank you, Sophie. Or at least in your wrists, because if I, as I understand it, throttling rattlesnakes is really wrist work more than anything. I have a very firm grip, I think.

Yeah. So I've noticed that. That's a big thing about me. Yeah. So for months, Sally and John Brinkley toured around pretending to be a Quaker doctor and his wife selling nonsense medicine from a wagon. This worked for a while, but it eventually turned out that he and Sally didn't really like one another. They split up, not even bothering to divorce, and he headed off to pursue his medical ambitions in a more serious fashion. He enrolled at the Bennett Medical College of Chicago and then the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City.

Oh, so he did decide to go to medical school. Well, so he went to, he went to things that were, that had names that made them sound like medical schools. Oh, I see. So these aren't accredited universities. These are in no way accredited universities. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, and he didn't get full degrees from these non-accredited universities anyway. He got a $25 loan from a loan shark that he never managed to repay, and eventually he skipped town before finishing school. Good for him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did get like a sort of undergraduate certification, I guess you'd call it, but again, it was unaccredited. Now, in a little bit of fairness to John Brinkley, at this point in time in history, medicine wasn't really a thing in the way it is today. So eclectic medicine is what we'd call like naturopathy now. It's using like herbs and, and poultices and like waving sticks around and chanting and stuff. Like it incurred all of that stuff, but this was 1908. So like the real doctors were pouring mercury in people and bleeding them to death.

Yes. So there were actually situations in which a doctor with Brinkley's training would probably do better work on you than a real doctor, because eclectic doctors didn't bleed people or feed them mercury. So it's, he's going to be beyond the point of being fair to at a certain point. But, but up to this state, like he's not necessarily a hack and a fraud, because medicine is kind of nonsense. So him being a bad doctor actually makes him a better doctor than the real doctors, like him being fake. Is that? Yeah.

Okay. It's, it's kind of that like if you're most of medicine was wrong at this point. Yes. And, and if you're wrong in a way to which you're not filling people's bodies with mercury and radium, then you're better for them. And like there is some, there are some like herbs and stuff that have actual medicinal potential. There were some eclectic doctors. Yeah. Smoking that.

It is still legal at this point. So yeah. So about 4% of doctors in this period were eclectics. Of course, Brinkley was not one of them because he didn't graduate, but he did get an undergraduate degree that qualified him to practice medicine in a couple of states. And, you know, while he was sort of bumming around St. Louis drinking heavily, he met a one armed man named James Crawford and the two decided to open what was essentially a fake medical practice together. Okay. Crawford decided to go by the name Dr. Burke and Brinkley went by the name Dr. Blakely. They called their operation the Greenville Electromedical Doctors.

Now, I just was trying to be fair to eclectic medicine by talking about how it could be more reasonable than real medicine at that point in time in history. This is the point at which we get past them being reasonable. Okay. Because 1908 is a period in which electricity is still new and exciting. And like every new technology, people assume that because it was shiny and different, it must confer incredible health benefits. Sure. So, electric medicine was kind of a fad at this point. People would like fake doctors would sell electric ointments, electric toothbrushes, electric tinctures, electric food, electric corsets.

Just by shocking someone with electricity, you could claim to be curing them. And most people would be surprised enough by the sensation that they just sort of go along with it. Sure. According to the book, charlatan, quote, Dr. Burke asked a few questions, made a few notes and put out his palm for $25, a massive sum. From there, the client passed into the treatment room where Dr. Blakely spent the morning injecting colored water into rear ends. If anyone asked, he said it was electric medicine from Germany. Into those rear ends? Yeah, he's shooting dyed water into people's asses and telling them that it's electric German medicine.

Okay, good. Is he also shooting electricity into people's asses? No, he's just lying and claiming it's electric water medicine. I think they probably have some like electric gizmos near the water so that people believe that it's electric medicine. Sure. It's just ass water. It's just colored ass water. Okay, good. So this scam worked out for a while, but obviously shooting people's asses full of colored water did not cure any known problem aside from the dubious problem of not having enough colored water in your asshole.

Brinkley and Crawford were eventually rightfully arrested for being frauds and thus ended the saga of the Greenville Electromedical Doctors. Okay. I feel like what do people get, what is that called, a colonic to clean out your bum? Yeah. I wonder if maybe that dyed water in people's asses was doing something like that. I don't know if colonics have any sort of medical benefits, but I just want to give him credit where credit's due. Yeah, I think colonic would be a good example of modern day snake oil. Because while there are certain situations in which they can be helpful, they're kind of treated as cure-alls for problems.

Right. I guess I think it's the same thing as electrocuting someone and it being a weird sensation and so you assume something medical has happened. I think a lot of people get stuff shot up their asses and are like, well, that feels weird. It must be doing something. Uh-huh, yes. Yeah, the placebo effect kind of does the rest. Yeah. I was going to make a pun like the ass-cebo effect, but I don't know if it was going to work, but I said it anyway. The placebo?

Yeah. I think that's one of those jokes that works better written than spoken. Yes. Yeah, that's a good one. Well, we tried. We tried. We tried. We tried. Now, after getting out of jail, not a Dr. Brinkley met a girl named Minnie.

She would prove to be the love of his life, mainly because she was exactly as down with his dreams of pretending to be a doctor as he was. For three years, the couple wandered around Kansas and Arkansas with Brinkley working as a traveling doctor and Minnie acting as his assistant. He eventually made enough money at this to buy a diploma, which made his claims to actually be a doctor more credible. On May 7th, 1915, the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City gave him the validation he'd always craved. This MD cost Brinkley $100 and gave him the right to practice medicine in eight states. So he immediately set up shop in Arkansas working as a rural doctor. His big strategy was to rent a horse and charge out of town numerous times as if he was constantly on important emergency calls, saving lives. This particular grift did not work out, and he and Minnie had to leave.

Okay. We're at the low point in our hero's journey right now. But you know what can be the high point in your hero's journey, listener? And you as well, Caitlin? Yes. Is the fine products and or services that advertise on our show that aren't snake oil? Which certainly aren't going to be snake oil. No.

We do not advertise for any companies that will shoot electric water up your ass. And if we did, I promise you, listener, it will be the best electric ass water that anybody serves. We vet all ass-based businesses that advertise on the show. Personally, I do. I personally do that. Yes. It's critical. It's important.

It's good for ass-based medicine without putting your own ass on the line. Exactly. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So, products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. He's not on the good-bad-ass way.

He's on the nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match, isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back. Oh, those are some good products. Those are really good. Wait, can I just quickly recap what we've learned so far about his like... Please do. Please do. So he practices medicine sort of without any sort of credentials.

And then he goes to an unaccredited university and doesn't finish, and then opens up a medical practice and then gets arrested, and then he buys a diploma without getting any sort of medical training, or like any additional medical training, but because he has the diploma that he bought, he is now certified to practice medicine in eight states. Now is this the eclectic medicine, or is this like the more legitimate medicine? It's eclectic medicine, none of it's... I mean, yeah, it's eclectic medicine, which is seen as semi-legitimate at that point in time. I see.

Okay. Great. Well, I mean, I'm proud of him and his accomplishments so far. He's achieved his dreams. Yeah. I'm sure nothing horrible will happen. Definitely not. So, in 1916, Dr. Brinkley got a job at a meat-packing plant in Kansas City, working as a doctor

for the animals they kept on hand. He spent many hours on duty bored and watching the most entertaining thing available to him in those pre-television days. Billy Goats fucking. He later recalled being impressed by their considerable lubricity, which I think means that Billy Goat vaginas get really lubed up, but I'm not really sure. I mean, yeah, the main syllable there is lube, so... That's why it's my guess.

The root word, yeah. So, okay. The good, good. He thought Billy Goats fucked good, and he was also impressed by the fact that they got sick less than any other species of animal at the plant. So, he started to think about, well, would it be possible to take some of the traits of a Billy Goat and put that into a person? Yeah.

Okay. Can't wait to see where this is going, yeah. It's important you understand the importance of what we're called glands to cutting-edge medicine of the day. Now, glands were generally testicles from various species, including human beings. I'd like to read a quote from the website QuackWatch that sort of sums up the building science in this period of gland replacement. Okay.

Charles Edward Brown Saccard, a noted French physiologist, had shocked the medical community by injecting himself with the crushed testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs. Afterwards, he claimed that he had regained the physical stamina and intellectual vigor of his youth. Many men availed themselves of Saccard's methods, but once the placebo effect was filtered out, little remained. In Vienna, physiologist Eugene Steinek proposed that youthful vitality could be restored by increasing levels of testosterone.

The easiest way to do this, Steinek said, was through vasectomy. Human production wasted testosterone, and if the channel leading from the testes to the ejaculatory duct were tied off, then blood levels of testosterone would rise. Brinkley may also have heard of the work of Serge Voronoff, a French doctor who was stirring up a storm of controversy with his experimental gland transplants. Voronoff had been a physician in the court of the king of Egypt, and there had spent a great deal of time treating the court eunuchs, who suffered from a variety of illnesses. He hypothesized that maintaining active genital glands was the secret to health.

As proof, he cited his experiments with an aging ram into which he had transplanted the testicles of a young lamb. The ram's wool got thicker, and his sexual vigor returned. Voronoff then went on to transplant bits of monkey testes into aging men. He claimed success, although he could offer no scientific validation of his claim. So... Okay, so science of this time was hot- A lot of putting balls in.

Yeah, just like, just men being obsessed with their balls. That has not changed to the science of today. You're absolutely right, yes. In that point in time, they would look at other animals that had big balls, or fucked a lot, and be like, what if I put those balls in my balls? Yeah. And, yeah, that was... I mean, it's some innovative thinking, so...

Yeah, it's innovative. So all this was cooking off in the air in the medical community while Brinkley was getting his start. Now, in mid-1917, he was briefly drafted by the military to work as a doctor for the 64th Infantry Division. He served a total of about two months, most of which he spent in sick bay complaining of multiple rectal fistulas. He was kicked out of the military in August.

Next, Dr. Brinkley and many moved to a little Kansas town called Milford. It was not quite in the middle of nowhere, but you might call it nowhere adjacent. Brinkley worked as a rural doctor again, and his wife worked as a midwife. They made enough money to get by, working incredibly hard and providing a useful service to their local community. Naturally, John Brinkley hated it, and desperately wanted a way out. That way it was survived by... He's like, not enough balls!

Not enough balls! Well, the good news is that he was about to get so many more balls than anybody should ever have. Thank goodness. He was approached one day by a 46-year-old farmer named Bill Stitzworth. Now, Stitzworth came by Brinkley's office one day and said, There's something wrong with me. Though look at me, you wouldn't judge it.

I do look husky, don't I? When Brinkley nodded, Stitzworth continued, I'm all in. No pep. I'm a flat tire. Now, this was Stitzworth's way of slowly admitting, in 19 like teens terms, that his dick didn't work so well anymore. This shouldn't have been surprising. I think it's pretty normal for 46-year-old men who work an intense backbreaking physical

labor job to have trouble with that. In fact, it might be weirder if he'd had no issues at all. But Stitzworth complained to Dr. Brinkley that he'd tried serums, medicines, and electricity, all to no avail. Now, next, according to legends that were later spread by Dr. Brinkley himself, the old farmer sighed and said, Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts. Good. We only have Dr. Brinkley's recollections of what happened next, and they come from

a biography he commissioned 20 years later called Life of a Man. So put a little bit of salt on this next quote. The doctor half-closed his eyes and considered, and then he shook his head slowly. The code of ethics his father had drilled into him forever forbade him from any conducts, especially with relation to healing, except the utterly honest and straightforward. But the father begged and begged, and eventually Brinkley agreed. He would try and put goat testicles into the farmer's body. His official publications made it later seem like he was basically forced into it out of

sheer empathy for the distraught patient, but years later, Stitzworth's family would admit that Brinkley had offered the old farmer hundreds and hundreds of dollars to let him experiment on his body. Wow. That's cool. Where's this farmer getting all this money for goat balls? The farmer got the money from Dr. Brinkley. Oh, okay.

Oh. Yeah. Yeah. He bribed him to let him put goat balls in him to test out the surgery. I see. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So Dr. Brinkley removed a healthy goat's testicles and just sort of shoved him inside the farmer's nut sack and then sewed it up. Stitzworth reported an increase in vitality, possibly due to the placebo effect and also possibly due to just lying. The word spread across town and soon another farmer and then another had received goat ball implants. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Stitzworth demanded that she get a set of goat ovaries to increase

her own fertility and vitality. Oh no. According to Life of a Man, quote, Dimley Brinkley had begun to realize that he was gifted beyond the run of doctors. So he realized that he was an unusually talented surgeon and an unusually brilliant thinker due to the incredible success of his goat testicle and ovary implants. Now, I don't know if you know this or not, but is he replacing the human testicles with the goat stuff?

No. In addition to what's already there. He's just jamming them up in there. Okay. Oh no. Now, sometimes it's just bits of goat testicles. He does it a little bit different every time because he's not a real doctor. Sure.

I mean, who needs consistency when it comes to medical procedures? So he decided that someone with his sheer God-given talent could not limit themselves to the rules of the jealous sheep ethics of the American Medical Association and the other gradually professionalizing medical bodies of the era. Dr. Brinkley had developed an intense dislike of the AMA. Some of this may be due to the fact that a few weeks after his first goat ball implantation, he traveled to Chicago to take a refresher course on surgery. He failed the class.

His teacher said that this was because of his attendance not being regular and because of his indulgence in alcohol. I admonished him to leave liquor alone and to concentrate on worthwhile endeavor and improve himself as a man and a physician. To which he replied, I have a scheme up my sleeve and the whole world will hear of it. Okay. So he's just like this drunk dude who's like- He's just a drunk guy putting balls in it.

Act like loudly admitting that he's planning to scam everybody and pretty successfully scamming everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. In August 1918, John Brinkley opened the Brinkley Institute of Health in Milford, Kansas. The growth of his clinic was massively aided by the fact that, months after his surgery, Stitsworth and his wife had a boy.

They named him Billy. Oh no, after Billy Goat? He became the first goat gland baby and of course his very existence was credited to Dr. Brinkley's incredible science. More testimonials followed soon after the old farmer and business then poured into Dr. Brinkley's clinic. He began charging $750 in operation. That's about $14,000 in modern money.

Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. It's expensive. It's like what you'd pay for major cosmetic surgery today, but it's just goat testicles. Right. Now, obviously many of these implantations did not work. Some of them, I mean none of them worked, but many of them had disastrous side effects.

But it is kind of shocking how many people had goat testicle pieces put into their balls without anything terrible happening. The human body is incredible is what I'm getting at. I mean, it's very resilient, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Part of why so many people reported incredible benefits undoubtedly owes to the placebo effect.

Some of it though was due to Dr. Brinkley's peculiar advertising brilliance. Here's quack watch again. All men needed the Brinkley operation, he declared, but the procedure was most suited to the intelligent and least suited to the stupid type. This of course ensured that few of his patients would admit they had not benefited from the operation. So he warned people before going in that like it doesn't work on dumb people. Wow.

It's just kind of brilliant. So he's putting people in a position where they have to basically just lie and say, yeah, this is working out great for me. Huh. Okay. I mean, I love heavy gaslighting in medical procedures as well. Oh, he is the gaslightingist doctor, I think I can imagine. All right.

Man. No. I mean, so wait, another question. Sure. He's mostly doing this for, he's putting testicles into men's ball sex, but there was at least one case of a woman having over a number of cases. Okay. So there are.

Okay. All right. So he's just that he did more balls than ovaries. I see. But he's maybe not equal, but like, you know, there's some, yeah, he overries up a lot of ladies and actually, you know, spoilers, Caitlin, he's kind of a feminist icon, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Yeah.

I love it. Feminist icon goat ball doctor, John Brinkley. Great. Now, right as the greatest grift of, right as the greatest grift of Dr. Brinkley's life was kicking off, the great influenza epidemic hit. This is the nightmarish wave of disease that killed more people in World War one. It was a terrible nightmare and completely counter to the rest of his life. Dr. Brinkley rose wonderfully to the situation.

He was remembered by locals as being a wonderful doctor during this period who only lost a single patient to the flu epidemic and worked all around, you know, offering people, uh, free care and whatnot to take care of the horribly ill people who were dying of the influenza. So this is like a singular moment in his career, like for this, this one period of time, he was a real doctor, uh, and, and then he just went right back to scamming people for the rest of his life. But there is one redeeming moment in his life and it's the influenza epidemic.

So there you go. Yeah. Now, once the epidemic was over, Dr. Brinkley got right back to work scamming the shit out of people. Once his work drew attention and media coverage, people were soon literally camping out around his clinic. Men and women, for a little while, implanting goat ovaries in ladies was almost as booming a trade as implanting goat testicles in men.

Okay. Dr. Brinkley claimed the ovaries would enhance fertility, but would also remove wrinkles and increase breast size. So I mean, everything that a woman cares about. Everything that a woman cares about in one set of severed goat ovaries, I'm going to go get my goat ovaries right after we're done. I mean, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to spoil the next ad break, but we are selling goat ovary pills for a limited time.

Yeah. Guaranteed to do whatever, whatever you need, goat ovaries will take care of it. Great. Yeah. So, now, obviously a lot of Brinkley's patients got sick and died because he was just filling people up with the dead body parts of animals and that's not great for you, but the internet didn't exist. And so Dr. Brinkley was able to sort of fill the media of the day with tales of his patients,

quote, astonishing sexual vigor. And most people just sort of trusted him. He also shared case studies of patients whose lives were changed in more significant ways. One popular account was of a boy Brinkley described as deranged, who in his words, quote, had been told finally that he was incurable and must remain a mental defective. He had decided to commit suicide if I failed to remedy his condition. And 36 hours after the insertion of goat glands, this patient's temperature had risen to above 103 Fahrenheit, but became normal 24 hours later and has since remained so.

His mind is gradually cleared. He looks and feels younger and is contemplating marriage. The hideous dreams and nightmares which had destroyed his sleep and rest all his past life have left him. My second case of insanity, caused this time by excessive masturbation, was a young bank clerk brought to me from a state institution. Following gland transplantation, his mind cleared completely and he is now the head of a large banking institution.

I mean, those are some ringing endorsements. Now, it's interesting to me that goat testicles can both increase your vitality and help you get erections to impregnate your wife and stop your excessive masturbation so that you can become a bank president. And also apparently cure mental illness and depression. Yes. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't goat balls clear depression?

Exactly. Yeah. That's just obvious. So, within a couple of years, John Brinkley had identified 27 different illnesses that could be cured by goat balls, everything from dementia to farting. He ensured people that his operations had a 95% success rate, which was just low enough to explain away the odd death or life-altering infection as a result of his not entirely competent surgical administration.

As a rule, Brinkley was way worse at surgery than he was at selling. His slogans, all energy is sex energy and a man is as old as his glands, were both pretty great. I mean. Yeah. What year was this? I mean, that's, yeah. This is 1918.

Wow. Like, all energy is sex energy is like something you'd hear at a fucking very specific kind of yoga retreat in Santa Monica. Right. I feel like I tweeted that like two days ago. Incredible. Okay. No, he was ahead of his time and will consistently be ahead of his time until the day he dies.

All right. But I don't want to spoil things too much. So in private, Dr. Brinkley had a habit of calling his patients old fools, especially while drinking. But in public, he was the picture of the genteel man of medicine. Much of his credibility came from the Van Dyke goatee he wore, which was seen as the hallmark of the doctor because people back then were very dumb, just as they are now. The reality, of course, is that John Brinkley was no more a doctor than I am a mechanic

just because it was able to hit my car that one time and make the engine turn over. According to the book, charlatan, he only had a wavering conception of how to perform his own signature surgery, quote, sometimes he slivered the animal gland like a clove of garlic and put the pieces in the patient. Sometimes he joined the smaller testicle to the larger, a process he likened to embedding a marble in an apple. Sometimes the operation was, yeah, that's pretty fucked up. Oh my God.

I'm so grossed out, okay. Sometimes the operation was no more complex than tossing a Christmas present into a bag. Skill wasn't the issue. Technically speaking, he was a competent surgeon when he put his mind to it, but quality control was iffy at best. Brinkley performed operations both before and after the cocktail hour, and as his enterprise expanded, he passed off more and more of the work to assistance with medical credentials even whisperier than his own.

As a result, dozens of patients died over the years, either in the operating room or shortly after the return home. Many others were permanently maimed. So that's cool. Very cool. I'll play it backtrack for just one second, and so the reason people trusted him was largely, did you say because of his goatee, his facial hair? Yeah, that was a big part of it.

Yeah, he had the kind of facial hair all doctors were supposed to have. Okay. I didn't realize that was a thing. Number one, number two, were they called goatees back then, and did that have anything to do with the fact that people trusted his goatee, because if it was like he has a goatee and then he puts goat balls into your body, that- I see what you're getting at, but no, they called it a van dyke. Okay.

Sophie will show you the picture of him, and you can see, like once you see his facial hair, you'll recognize it as like every doctor in like a 1940s, like Looney Tunes cartoon has the same hair. I see. Yeah, you see that? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. It's wild that you could just have a certain type of facial hair and be like, yes, this is my profession. Well, I guess he's a doctor. Look at his facial hair. Right. Oh, man. There was the world, like we get down on the internet because all the Nazis and the anti-vaccine

lies and stuff, but before the internet, being a doctor just been having a goatee and a lab coat, so it's not like people have ever been very good at vetting reality. Yes. Well, some progress has been made since then, but it's just a consistently mixed bag. Yeah. All right. Now, Dr. Brinkley build the purpose of his work is aiding hopeless couples and conceiving children.

He so he slid articles into the local news with titles like Dr. J. R. Brinkley swamped with letters from women craving halo of motherhood, and the reality is that a lot of desperate people did see him as something of a fertility messiah. At one point, he claimed to be able to even reverse hysterectomies by shoving goat ovaries inside ladies. By the summer of 1920, he'd pretty much stopped performing surgery on female clients. It's debatable as to why my suspicion would be that stuff like male vitality is easy to boost via the placebo elect alone effect alone since erections are largely mental.

So if you tell some guy he's got supercharged goat balls in his body, maybe he actually gets more erections, but you can't really trick women into having a uterus like placebo effect doesn't go that Robert think again, because I think you could trick me into thinking I had a uterus if I didn't, which I don't want my uterus. So actually that brings me to me trying to sell my uterus right here on this. And then you can put it. What? Okay, hang on.

If there was a sick goat and you took out my uterus and gave it to the goat, I feel like based on everything we've learned so far, that would actually help the sick goat. You know, you're thinking like a 1920s doctor because right around this time, I think it was a French physician took a monkey's ovaries and put it in a woman just to see if he could make a monkey human hybrid. Oh no. Why would he want to do that? They would just try and anything.

He would throw everything at the wall days of medicine. There were no rules. There was no like, like people tried to do everything because they like they just figured out like antibiotics, which is like, you know, you come from the era when like getting like scraped by a wooden sliver on your way out to the barn is a death sentence and antibiotics seem like fucking magic. So people are just like anything's possible. They try it everything.

So is like all of this is really ridiculous and the credible doctors of the day are all against Brinkley and say he's crazy, which we will talk about a lot more later. But people aren't quite as dumb as they would have been in another era to believe this stuff worked just because a lot of medicine was fucking nonsense back then. Right. Yeah. Right. So we will continue talking about Dr. John Brinkley and his nonsense medicine, but you

know what's not nonsense, Caitlin? The products that we're about to tell you about. Well, you got it half right, but you forgot the services and the services. Yes. I'm sorry. You never want to forget the services. Yeah. A service without a product is like a product without a service.

Exactly. Exactly. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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podcasts. We're back. Soviet just called me a nerd, which I don't appreciate. Soviet, would you kindly, since I'm not there right now, throw the throwing bagels across the room in anger for me? I don't, I have to hold on. So he's going to get throwing bagels. Well she does that.

I'm going to keep reading about Dr. Brinkley. So in 1921, Brinkley had attained enough renown that he was able to visit Park Avenue Hospital in Chicago and perform 34 gonad transplants. He had moved on from just operating on local farmers. One of his patients was a judge. Another was the chancellor of the university's law school, a guy named JJ Tobias. When the Syracuse Herald interviewed Tobias after and asked if he felt younger, he said, I feel 25 years younger.

I'm a new man, full of pep, strong, healthy, ready to go on with my work. I was ill, old, and played out, but the operation has revivified me. Next the reporter asked, how does it feel to have been old and then be young again? Glorious. It is so wonderful. It is almost unbelievable. The public cannot appreciate what the operation means. There has been some levity over the news of gland operations, but they should be treated

with the greatest respect and admiration. He moves on from, I'm going to give you erections with goat balls, to I will literally make you younger with goat testicles. Because people want to be younger so badly, a whole lot of distinguished men just buy right into it. Right. First of all, can I say that I love your old-timey voice. Thank you.

I'm very proud of it. You're doing a great job. Secondly, it's wild, I mean, I guess this isn't specific to men, but I guess because we're talking about, I mean, men are mostly his patients, but the lengths that men will go to, to just try to fuck better and have better balls and stuff like it. It's amazing. Yeah. It is, I feel like if instead of fire, the first human invention had been Viagra, like

men at least would never have invented anything else. It would have all been on women to figure out concrete and stuff like men would just be, no, we've got the dick pill, what else do we need? Which honestly, I wish that had happened because I think the world would be a much better place if women had invented everything else. Oh, a thousand times better, yeah. Oh man. We got to go back.

Let's get a time machine, go back to Neanderthal days, caveman times and just give the men Viagra and then be like, all right, ladies, your path is free and clear to do whatever you want. These pills will make your dicks do whatever you want, ladies. Take it away. Here's, it's all on you now. Yeah. Oh, if only.

One can help. If only. So for a long time, John Brinkley was able to basically portray himself as the man who had conquered aging. He began to make bold claims about his ability to cure other diseases like blindness and the very near future. His delusions of grandeur were compelling to people who saw him at symposiums and at his office.

They were less compelling to the people who worked with him on a daily basis. For one thing, John still drank way too much. One night he got wasted and destroyed his neighbor's car with an axe for unclear but certainly awesome reasons. Another time he got plowed and chased a bunch of his own patients out of his hospital with a butcher knife. In March of 1921, one of his neighbors filed a protection order against the good doctor. Brinkley explained, I made some remarks concerning this fellow that caused him to be afraid,

I guess, and they put me under a bond. I don't know whether I was arrested or not, but I had to give a bond of a thousand dollars not to shoot him. I don't know whether I was arrested or not. And I think, I don't think he's lying about that. I think he was so drunk that he really was like, yeah, I don't know what the fuck happened. I chase people with weapons all the time. Yikes, John.

This is the stuff that makes me almost like him because it makes me feel like he's a kindred spirit because I don't know if you know this about me, Caitlin, but I love chasing my patients and neighbors with knives. It's just a good time. Everybody has fun. You get your cardio in. Yeah. Yeah.

Good stuff. Good, good, good. Everything's great. Anyway, there was a rumor that Dr. Brinkley's assistant, Dr. Osborne, who was one-eared, was one-eared because Dr. Brinkley had literally bitten the other ear off. Oh my God. He's entirely possible that this is the case. Like, a lot of people lost ears for random reasons back then, but yeah, he seems like

he might have been an earbiter. Yeah. It would not be the craziest thing he did. No. But no amount of bad behavior from Dr. Brinkley was enough to turn the town of Milford against him. The huge amount of money he brought in helped, and by the early 20s, he was performing 50 operations a month, which meant his clinic was bringing in $500,000 a year in 1920s money.

Wow. That's roughly $7 million a year today. So he's doing well for himself. Yes. And a decent chunk of that money got reinvested back into Milford. He paid for new sidewalks, a new sewer, electric lights, a paved road to the railroad station, and a new bank. He tried to start a zoo, and even bought the town a bear.

Unfortunately, the bear was too loud, and it kept Dr. Brinkley awake at night, so he shot it to death. Okay, okay. He bought the town a bear? He sure did. Just a bear to hang around. To start a zoo. Okay.

It was too loud, so he shot it a bunch. Oh my gosh. I'm just thinking of Paddington, Paddington Bear, and anyway, that's not important. Okay. Here's my real question. Where is he getting all of the goat balls? Goats. Goats, and in fact, patients could pick out, they had a pin of goats, and patients would

pick out the goat they wanted their balls from. Okay. So, it was like going to a nice, like, one of those fancy steak restaurants where you get to, like, pick the animal. Right. You get to pick your goat, and you get its testicles. Or, like, a lobster, and a lobster. Okay.

Yeah. So, I understand that goat balls- But instead of a lobster, it's testicles. Yeah. So, I understand that goat balls come from goats. I'm not, I don't know who Romulus is, but I do know that much. So, he's like, he's, is he breeding the goats? And how could he even breed them if he's taking all their balls away?

And then also, like, that has to meet, that's so many goats. Yeah. I mean, he's buying a lot of goats. Okay. You know, he's buying 50 goats a month or so, which is a sizable number of goats. And then just, like, castrating them? And then- Yeah, yeah.

Did the goats, did they live after that? I assume they ate them. Okay. He's eating the goats. No, I mean, the goat could stay alive without balls. Right. And they were eaten after that. I don't really know, though, you know, he's known up and written about his goats.

I want to know more about his goats. So he's, I feel like because he's such a shitty surgeon and he is drunk all the time, he's probably just accidentally killing these goats when he's, like, castrating them or whatever. I'm going to guess he wasn't very careful with the goat castration. Definitely not. I feel so bad for all these goats. I'm going to guess that wasn't a priority. Oh my, these poor goats.

Yeah. You're a bear. Definitely a victim. And the bear is a victim. All of the people who got goat balls shoved into them, I would say they're victims, too. Also victims, yes. Yeah. I feel less bad for them than the bear because the bear didn't do fucking anything.

No. Like, neither did the goats. I just don't like goats as much as I like bears and that's, I guess, racism on my part. I'm fine with it. I mean, there's no Paddington goat, so I get it. There's no Paddington goat and there's no goat on the California state flag. True. Mm-hmm.

I mean, goats are, baby goats are so cute the way they jump around and hop and hop. Yeah, they're adorable. Yeah. Very cute. Very cute animals. Now, I know what you're wondering at this point, Katelyn. Yes. What kind of goat, what kind of goat did he get the testicles from?

I do wonder that because I don't really know the different types of goats. Well, he preferred to use Togenberg goat balls because he thought they were better balls. One time, he did have a set of patients from California who demanded that he put Angora goat testicles in them. I mean, I guess because Angora goats are used to make very fancy- Sweaters. Yeah. Yeah.

And so they wanted the fanciest goats because they were Californians. Obviously. But apparently, Angora goat testicles stink horribly and made the testicles of his customers stink horribly. So this was one of the issues that he encountered in his goat ball practice. Okay. Because I'm sure- That's a bummer.

Because these balls smelled fine otherwise without the Angora goat. Yes. I'm certain. People aren't bathing every day back then. I'm certain they're 1920s balls that smelled wonderful before the goats. Yeah. Okay. So wait, what is the first type of goat you said?

Togenberg goats. Togenberg. I've never heard of that type of goat. Well now, Katelyn, if you're ever at a party and someone's like, hey, if I want to replace my testicles with goat testicles, what type of goat should I use? You'll know it's a Togenberg. Yes. There's no other goat to replace your testicles with.

And rest assured that every party I go to, that question is being asked. So- Oh, I know. I know. We go to a lot of the same parties and I'm usually shouting about goat testicles at any given one of them. Yes. Can confirm.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, the issues of patients occasionally demanding smelly goat testicles was minor compared to the major issue presented by real doctor Morris Fishbeen. Now, Fishbeen was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. And Fishbeen was like an actual doctor. The AMA at this point, you know, they still did some stuff that we would consider quackery. Sure.

But they were trying to apply real science to medicine. So they were gradually learning what didn't work as opposed to just continuing to jam goat testicles in people for huge amounts of money. Anyway, according to QuackWatch, Fishbeen, quote, called Brinkley a smooth-tongued charlatan and urged the authorities to revoke his right to practice. Brinkley's assertion that his procedure could cure conditions ranging from insanity to acne to influenza and high blood pressure amounted to quackery, Fishbeen said. In response to this, Brinkley called the American Medical Association a meat-cutter's union

and charged that its members were jealous of him because they were losing business. So by 1922, John Brinkley had gotten rich enough selling quack nonsense remedies to make vain men feel younger that there was really only one place on earth for him to go next. Los Angeles. Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's where you go. That's where you go. There he met up with Harry Chandler, the owner of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler had invited him out to California in the first place to do a story on him. Because Harry Chandler was the true paragon of journalism, he intended to do this story by having Dr. Brinkley insert goat testicles into one of his editors. He told John, quote, if the operation is a success, I'll make you the most famous surgeon in America.

If it's a failure, I'll damn you with the same gusto. Now, the issue that confronted Dr. Brinkley is that under California law, his medical license was not valid. Thankfully, this was the 1920s and Harry Chandler was able to secure him a 30-day permit to practice medicine. And so Dr. John Brinkley began cutting out goat testicles and sticking them inside human beings once more. He implanted new balls in Chandler's editor, in a US circuit court judge, in several unnamed

movie stars, and, according to rumor, even in Harry Chandler himself. Many of his patients gave his work rave reviews, as can be seen in the title of this 1922 LA Times article. New life in glands. Dr. Brinkley's patients here show improvement. Many victims of incurable diseases are cured. 1,200 operations. All are successful.

Do you think Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton have goat balls in their bodies? I think so. Yeah. I think he met Buster Keaton and Buster Keaton made a movie in this time that referenced goat gland operations. Oh, really? Yeah, it's entirely possible. We know several movie stars, because it's like they're movie stars.

If you tell them you can make them young again and fuck better. Exactly. They're going to. Yeah. Hollywood's never changed. No. Wow. If he came to town today and people believed this, like fucking every famous guy in town

would be. Yeah. Who else? Faddy R. Buckle? Was that a, I feel like that was a guy from that era. I should know this. I have several film degrees. I feel like Faddy R. Buckle was a guy in that era.

This is before he crushed that woman to death accidentally. Well, that's probably not what happened, but that's what he got, that's what he got tired for. Right. He got carried over on that one and may have actually been a nice guy. I don't know. Faddy R. Buckle. I don't know either.

We'll do some research about it. Yeah. Did we talk about it in the episode about the Nazis in Hollywood? Speaking of which, Nazis do come into this story later. Uh-oh. Yeah. It's going to be fun. Now, after performing $40,000 worth of operations, John Brinkley hit upon the idea of expanding

his practice. He decided to open a new clinic in Sonata, California. I secured a location at Sonata because of what appear to be climactic conditions, peculiarly favorable to goat gland operations. To perform the operation most successfully, the surgeon should be located where the climate ranges around 70 degrees and is not subject to sharp changes. So you really want those cool Southern California breezes on your goat balls? Yes, you do.

Which, of course you do. Of course you do. That's just basic science. Yeah, absolutely. But alas, John Brinkley's ability to practice in the Golden State relied on his ability to get a permanent medical license there. And this was something the state of California was unwilling to grant him, due in large part to the crusading work of Dr. Morris Fishbeam.

Brinkley found himself denied and forced back to Milford. John put a good face on it, claiming he'd never really wanted to move out to California anyway and that everyone knew the calm restorative powers of the Kansas countryside were better for a hospital than stupid old California. Yeah. The reality is that he was deeply worried. Morris Fishbeam and the AMA were increasingly writing his ass for all of the dangerously unregulated surgery that he was performing.

Brinkley fired back by having his publicity people shoot out even more testimonials from satisfied goat testicle recipients. Testimonials. Sorry. Testimonials. I didn't even get that. That's good. Thank you.

That's what I'm here for. Testimonials. Yeah. We'll make that. We'll make that T-shirt that. She's nodding not reluctantly. She's nodding enthusiastically so anyway. Maybe goat ball recipient T-shirts that just say, I have a goat's testicles and we'll

work on the top. We'll keep binging that bag and forth. Brinkley's biggest coup was Senator Wesley Staley of Colorado who called Brinkley and his wife, quote, two of the finest people and the greatest benefactors to mankind on earth. I wear goat glands and I'm proud of it. That's what we put on this shirt. And then below that, testimonial.

Testimonial. Hmm. Dr. Brinkley collected a hundred different testimonials, testimonials, into a book called Shadows and Sunshine and published it in an effort to fight back against what he claimed was the AMA's dangerous misinformation. The AMA tried to repost, most notably with a series of posters titled Testimonials Are Worthless, which featured testimonials from patients claiming to have been cured of various diseases from quack medicine on one side and then those patients' death certificates listing

the cause of death as the exact illness they claimed to have had cured on the other side. These facts had close to zero impact on the American people. Not really. Folks still clambered to spend 65, yeah, yeah, exactly. People still were more than willing to spend $750 each on goat glands. But what about the folks who were too poor for Dr. Brinkley's revolutionary testicle surgery? Well, according to the book, Charlotton, quote, Brinkley had this angle covered already

with his special gland emulsion, which he sold mail order for $100. Rectal syringe included. Oh. Let's, yeah. Wait, hang on. He just grind, grind. If you couldn't afford to get goat balls implanted in your body, he would send you a bunch of ground up goat testicles in an ass syringe.

Okay, let me be clear about this. Sure. Absolutely. I feel like you don't need a syringe to insert something into your rectum. Your rectum is already, like, has an opening that you can put stuff in there. Yeah, but you really, you want to squirt this stuff up there. You really want to, I mean, I don't know if you've ever squirted ground up goat testicles inside your asshole, but you really want to get in there.

You want to get them right up in them guts, okay. Right up in them guts. Because that's where testicles do their most important work, is right up in them guts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew that. Exactly, exactly. Okay, okay. Yeah, of course, of course.

This is just basic science. We all graduated eighth grade. We know how science works. Yes. You shove the goat balls as far up your ass as you can go, and then you're healthy again. Okay, I just, I want to puke at the thought of a rectal syringe, but. That's one of the worst combination of words that I can imagine. Yes.

Okay, all right. To go on. Of course, people imitated Dr. Brinkley's goat gland products. There was the Youth Gland Chemical Laboratory of Illinois, the Vitallo Gland Company of Denver, Glandol, Glandtone, Glandine. Americans in the 1920s absolutely could not get enough glands. The money flowed in, and John Brinkley eventually realized that he needed to do something with it.

He decided to build a radio transmitter. Wait, whoa. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, you didn't call that, did you? No. Nobody calls that shit. Yeah. Yeah, he decides to build a radio transmitter.

In 1923, he got his first broadcasting license and started construction of a massive transmitting tower, one of the very first in the American Midwest. Now, radio wasn't really something that existed in a big way back then. It was early enough in the history of the medium that there was actually quite a bit of debate as to whether or not advertising should even be allowed on the radio. Most of what was out there was just broadcasts of symphony orchestras and other really boring bullshit. Brinkley's station, KFKB, which stood for Kansas first, Kansas best, was going to be

different. While he waited for construction to be completed, John Brinkley and many left the critical business of implanting goat balls into people to their assistants and went on an ocean liner voyage to Asia. He stopped in China, where Dr. Brinkley inserted goat testicles into the president of the Bank of Peking. Then they steamed hard to Japan, where Brinkley proceeded to insert more goat glands into more human males.

On April 21st, 1923, the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel ran this article. Gland transplantation now used by Japan to put aged and firm back at work. High-class goat prices soar. Okay. Quote from that article, goat gland transplantation has been made compulsory in Japan by the government in order to rejuvenate aged charity patients. Within the past few months, more than 2,000 of these inmates have been undergone the operation and are all again earning their own living.

So that's exciting. Yeah. It was a lie, obviously. I mean, yes, it was. But also if you look at it from the point of view that it's not a lie, he's actually like a really good person. Yeah. If you pretend it's not a lie, he's an incredible doctor.

I'm surprised that he, when you were saying earlier that he like sank so much of his money into like helping his town and I mean buying a bear that he did later shoot and kill. But I mean, he is, I suppose he's more philanthropic than I would have imagined. But. Yeah. And we'll get to that in a little bit. Some of that may have been self-preservation because it pays off for him in a big way in the second part of this story.

I see. Yeah. But I think also he just kind of wanted to be the biggest man in town and if you're going to be the biggest man in town and you don't want people to hate you, you got to bribe them with nice things. Right. Right. Okay.

So Dr. Brinkley through his interlocutors in the media began to claim that the goat glands he was putting in people did more than just restore their vitality. They helped breed a better class of human being. It was thinking that was deliriously in line with the popular eugenics talking points of the day. Oh. It's one of his minions, Dr. W.H. Baloo of New York City told reporters, the children of parents who have been endowed with

goat glands a healthy and alert to an unusual degree. New glands mean not only new vitality to men and women now living, but they actually mean better babies. I say in this, in making possible a superior type of human being, Dr. Brinkley has made a discovery of the first importance to mankind. Oh, wait, is this the part of the story that the Nazis come in? Because I... No, shockingly enough, this is not the part of the story where the Nazis come into it.

All right. Now, Dr. Brinkley was in reality about to make a discovery that would change the course of mankind and all of our lives forever, but that discovery had nothing to do with goat glands. It is however going to come next in part two of the epic tale of John Brinkley, the man who loved adding the balls of other animals to the balls of human beings. What a good cliffhanger. Thank you.

Thank you. I was proud of that one too. Yeah. Caitlin, you want to plug some plugables? Sure. Don't plug goat glands into the audience because there's not enough of that done already. Well, I guess I have to undo some damage I did to my patients. No, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at CaitlynDurante, that's C-A-I-T-L-I-N.

And then you can listen to the Bechtelcast, my podcast about the representation of women in movies that super producer Sophie sitting right next to me also produces. And there hasn't been a biopic made about John Brinkley, but if there was, you can bet your ass we would have covered it on the Bechtelcast. And you know what, I think it would pass the Bechtel test because John Brinkley was a feminist icon. Yes. And actually, little known fact, placing the testicles of goats into a human man, the

act of that, surprisingly enough, does pass the Bechtel test. Yeah. That's a little discussed corollary to the Bechtel test that you can either have two women have a conversation that doesn't involve a man or a relationship, or you can have somebody insert goat testicles into a human scrotum. Right. And I'm glad that we've cleared that up right now, right here right now. It's important.

Yes. So, yeah, check out my podcast and yeah, follow me on those places. Okay. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find me on The Gram as the kids call it at at Bastards Pod and also you can find this podcast on The Gram at at Bastards Pod. You can't find me there because Sophie runs both of those because I am not allowed. But that's for the best, for the best.

I'm sure she's nodding. Is she nodding, Caitlin? Yes. Enthusiastically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That seems right.

You can find T-shirts on tpublic.com. I have another podcast called It Could Happen Here. If you feel like after this lively story of testicle implants, you want to hear horrifying predictions of a civil war in modern America, you're a weirdo, but that podcast exists. Maybe check it out. Yeah. That's all I got, testicles. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Find Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells

my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.