Stuff You Should Know - John Brinkley: The Quackiest Quack in History?

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

John Brinkley was perhaps the biggest quack who ever claimed to be practicing medicine. Learn all about this not so good guy today!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on stage doing our thing again on May 4th, 5th and 6th this year. That's right. And I gotta say, we've done this topic a few times already. And it's a real banger and we can't wait to come to your city and have you see it with us. We're so excited and we just can't hide it. So go to linktree slash S-Y-S-K and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. So this is Stuff You Should Know, old-timey history edition,

quackery, sub-edition, let's go. Yeah, we've covered a lot of quacks over the years. It's kind of fun. I want to shout out the listener who wrote in about this one. This is where the idea came from. Oh. Because I had never heard of John Arbrinkley, the famous quack of the 1920s and 30s. But you know who did? Who? And I'm going to say, I'm going to spell it first. His name is Matt, S-E-J-N-O-W-S-K-I from Austin, Texas. And I wrote Matt back and I said, hey man, we're going to shout you out. Is the N silent? I figured it was Sejowski and he said the following.

The N is not silent. The J is like an H and the W was like an F. So then he phonetically spelled it out as uh, Senevsky. Oh, wow. There ain't no F in this thing, but it's Matt Senevsky. Very nice. That's a new one on me. So way to go, Matt, for your last time. So Matt's in this idea of John Arbrinkley, who was a very famous and wealthy quack in the 1920s and 30s who, um, Livia helped us put this together, which is a great, I'm sorry to Livia for having to do this, but he had this procedure called the goat gland procedure, which we'll get into in more detail later, but just as a way of setting it up, it's basically the practice of Xeno

transplantation. And also, Livia wanted to shout out the book, The Bizarre Career of John Arbrinkley by R. Alton Lee from 2002. A great book and seems to be the book on John Arbrinkley, but Xeno transplantation is sort of what he was dabbling in, and that's how we're going to start this thing out. Yeah, which is the thing. It's just using organs or tissue or whatever body parts from other species in humans, right? Yeah. So a pig heart transplant. Sure. Xeno transplantation. And it's something humans have been trying to crack for a little while because we place such little value on animals that we are like, well, let's just harvest them for parts for ourselves. Right. There's a lot of stuff that we've run into, still run into like specialized, weird,

exotic infections that you can get, just utterly rejecting your body, rejecting the organ or the tissue and actually getting mad at you for even trying it. But it's still going on and there's a long history of trying it that goes at least back to the 1600s with a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis, which is a great French name. And he started using blood from animals for blood transfusions. Yeah. And I think that was kind of the first whirl at melding our two worlds, our two bodies, and they banned it for a while. It had mixed results in France and said, no, you know, we shouldn't do this for a while. Yeah. And this is 17th century France saying we shouldn't do this. Exactly. So good for them. In the 19th century, they started messing around

with skin grafts from different animals. And it seems like the reports were, like success rates were mixed, but now we think modern medicine says, you know what it probably was, was more like, it didn't work like a graft, but sort of like a skin like a bandaid while your skin underneath repaired itself. Right. If it worked at all, that's probably what was going on. And they said, we should just make band-aids. Right. Make them out of pigeon skin. Exactly. So one of the other things is kind of like tangential to that, but very much involved is the idea that different parts of different animals can give you, can rejuvenate your vigor or give you sexual vitality, you know, like make you strong like bull kind of thing.

Sure. By eating bull's testicles. That's the kind of the premise behind it. And it's not technically xenotransplantation because you're not inserting it into your body through like surgery, but by ingesting it, it is kind of close as far as that whole thing goes. I mean, you're really splitting hairs if you're like, that's not xenotransplantation. Why are you even bringing that up? Yeah. And this, you know, this factors into the eventual goat gland procedure we're going to get to. That's why we mentioned it. But that's why I brought it up. Yeah. I mean, for, since the ancient Romans, there have been generally men that, you know, something happens to men when they get older. That's why they have ED drugs these days, because, you know,

virility goes down and maybe erectile dysfunction happens. So this has always been the case. And even in ancient Rome, they realized this when they got older, it was sort of a downhill slope, sexually speaking. And so they would do things like drink hawk semen or eat rabbit genitalia. And literally just sort of like eating these things, like you mentioned, eating bull testicles or whatever. Right. Has always been a thing, it seems like. That hawk semen came out of nowhere. So apologies to anybody who is eating breakfast right now. Good band name, though. Especially if you're eating cereal with milk. Right. All right. There is a guy named Charles Edward, or sorry, Charles Edward Brown. How do you say brown in French? Brown?

Brown. Sikard. He injected himself with some serum that he squeezed from the testicles of dogs and the testicles of guinea pigs. And he said, by God, this is amazing. I feel 30 years younger and I'm 72. I feel like I'm clearly in my 40s. And you guys got to try this. And it spread pretty quickly. But then the other physicians are like, it's not making me feel anything at all, except grossed out. So this is probably just a placebo effect that you were suffering from. They're like, still, let's get back to it. Let's keep trying. And then before Brinkley, not too long before, there was a pretty legit doctor named Sergei Voronoff who was doing surgeries where he would use monkey testicles and transplant monkey testicles.

And this was in France again in Paris. And then eventually thyroid glands from like a chimpanzee trying to cure thyroid deficiencies. So again, this just sort of idea of xenotransplantation has been around for a long time before John Brinkley was born in the hills of North Carolina in 1885. Yes. By the way, Sergei Voronoff's work, I think, is what led to the monkey gland cocktail. Oh, yeah? Yeah, gin, orange juice, grenadine, and absinthe. It's named monkey gland. They're talking about that operation of getting monkey testicles implanted in you. So they made a cocktail over it. That's probably a safer approach.

So Beta North Carolina or Beta North Carolina, it's in the Appalachian Mountains, it's in Western North Carolina or WNC. And he was born into an odd family arrangement. His father was also named John, and he was a mountain doctor, an Appalachian folk doctor, basically. And he was married to a woman named Sally Mingus. And they were happily married, apparently, until Sarah Candace Burnett, who was known as Candace, who was Sally's niece, came to live with them and very quickly got pregnant by John Sr. She was 24, he was 57. And that's where John Romulus Brinkley came from. And it just got odder from there, right? Yeah. So John Jr. then, his mom is... What would that relation even be if it was...

Well, it wouldn't be any relation to him, really. What? Sally Mingus? No, no, no. His mom, Sarah. That would be his mom. No, no, no. But what... I was trying to pin another... an extra relation, if you know what I mean. Sure. But there wouldn't be one because Sally wasn't even related to him. No, it's so...

Except by marriage to his father. Right. Oh, I see what you're saying. No, you're right. You're right. Yeah. No, I was about to be like, no, it's his cousin, but you're absolutely right. She's... There were no, like, yeah, no family shenanigans. But the long and short of it is, is that his real mom, Sarah, died at 24. John Sr. died not too long after that. And I believe by the time he was 10 years old, he was then being raised by Sally,

who was his dad's wife, but no relation. Right. Candice's aunt. Okay. Yeah. Isn't that odd? It is. And it's not... We've made it more confusing than it is. I don't think so. Okay. So actually, like, Brinkley, he was one of the great quacks of all time.

Like, one of the greatest ever to live. And he showed kind of an early talent for quackery. He was a good student in school, but he left at 16, ran off and got married. And he and his first wife, Sally, they had a medicine show, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're hawking tonics that you just completely made up out of a whole cloth. But you're doing it by being super entertaining. And that kind of, like, Olivia helped us with this, like you said.

And she, as she put it, it kind of set the stage for his later career. He only did it for about a year or so before he went off and did some other itinerant work. But apparently that was the bug that bit him all the way back then when he was, like, 20, early 20s. It was. And just to clear up, the Sally who was his wife was not his lady who raised him, Sally, who was not his mom. No. Although that really would have completed the circle had it been.

It really would have. And Olivia also points out something that this was at a time when the medical establishment was not super established yet. So the mountain folk doctor was perhaps way more trustworthy than this modern learned doctor who went to fancy medical school. And like, I don't want your your real, you know, medicines. I want a bloodletting or a purgative or some ivermectin or something. And it was definitely one of the situations where I was like, wow,

it's interesting how history can repeat itself all these years later. I was going to say, I'm so glad we've moved on from that after all these years. Exactly. It is crazy. I mean, that's exactly what's going on. It's like, oh, you're an expert. I don't trust you. I trust this guy who's trying to put a crystal in my anus. Well, there were a lot of weird similarities with history in like modern times to me, but I don't want to delve into this too much.

Okay. All right. But let's delve into medical school, which is what Brinkley finally did at Bennett Medical College. It was what was called an eclectic medical school. A lot of botanical remedies and stuff like that. And it was back then it was a genuine branch of medical practice. But what he didn't know is that it was sort of like when I went to my little NYU film school for two summers and they taught me how to edit film on the flatbed machine

and like six months later, they threw that all in the trash and said, now we're digital. He went to eclectic medical school and very soon after they were like, you know what, we don't really count that as medical school and we're the AMA and we're the deciders. Yeah. The Carnegie Foundation, I think, commissioned what came to be known as the Flexner Report in 1910, which basically said- I want to do a thing on that. We will someday, sure. But the Flexner Report basically said, we've just surveyed all of modern medicine in the

United States and it is in sad shape. We basically suggest that you should follow the biomedical model and feverishly stamp out any competition to it. And that's kind of where the AMA went. Yeah, exactly. So Brinkley now has this degree from Bennett College. He's not to say that it was a pure bunk degree or anything like that. He did go to lectures where there were real doctors.

There's this one endocrinologist, Henry Hauerwer was an endocrinologist who taught him. And he's where he sort of got the idea for these glandular extracts to heal the body. And I believe that's where Brinkley was kind of like, all right, let me put that in my hip pocket. Right. Hauerwer was like, try this adrenochrome. It'll really mess you up. So Brinkley was not a good guy. We'll just go ahead and spoil that.

Yeah. This isn't one of those stories where it's like, the guy took on the medical establishment or the guy was like a David and Goliath or he persisted or persevered. He was just like a rap scallion who is still lovable. He was a bad guy. Yeah. And there's a really early example of that where his marriage with Sally was on the rocks and she filed for divorce.

So he took their daughter, Wanda, their first and only child at the time, to Canada and basically held her hostage there until Sally agreed to reunite with them. Yeah. That's called kidnapping. Yeah. Literal kidnapping. And that's a good example of the kind of thing that he would do. And if you see pictures of this guy, he's got almost like a slight Casper Milktoast tinge to him.

But he was not at all Casper Milktoasty. He was not a good guy. You'll see. Just trust me. Yeah, he's got a bad look in his eye. You can tell. But like he's got a soft, soft rounded face. Yeah, he was a softy.

He also married his second wife, Minnie Talitha, when he was still married to Sally. I believe it took a few years even where he had two wives before he got formally divorced. So not a good guy on the home front. He drops out of medical school. He never finished, I believe. And then ended up, I think he did end up finishing medical school at the Eclectic Medical College of Kansas City in 1915. Didn't keep him from practicing doctoring in that sort of interim period.

But he and his wife, his second wife, Minnie, found an ad in the paper in 1917 from Milford, Kansas that said, hey, we're a small town, 2,000 people. We need a doctor and someone to run our pharmacy. Minnie had her own little dubious medical degree at this point. And so they said, all right, we're going to move to small town, Kansas, and be the town doctors. And that's what they did. So they were the medical providers for this entire town. I've seen 200 people was the population at the time.

I've seen 2,000, but I saw 200 on like a old PBS documentary on this. So I'm going to go with that one. Yeah, you going low? I am going low. So the Brinkley's provided care. Like they weren't, they didn't just immediately start grifting the town. Right. They actually did help see them through the 1918 flu epidemic.

They were fine. Like there was, people didn't have any real complaints about them. And then apparently just out of total happenstance, a farmer showed up at the practice. This farmer went unnamed, but this is supposedly the first goat gland patient. And it was the farmer's idea to transplant goats. So remember, other people are trying this. It's not completely out of left field, but it was the farmer's idea. And from different accounts, including one, there's a documentary called Nuts

with an exclamation point that says that the doctor or the farmer kind of had to talk Brinkley into it, that he was revolted by the idea at first. And then the farmer's like, I'll pay you. And he's like, oh, okay, sure. Let's do it. You going to read the quote? Go ahead. So the farmer, I think Brinkley had made a joke about the goats were so

virile. And the farmer said why he didn't quote, go ahead and put a pair of goat glands in me, transplant them, graft them on the way I'd graft a pound sweet on an apple stray. I don't know what any of that last part means. I think a pound sweet is a type of apple. And an apple stray is like a wild apple sapling that's sprouting up. So you want to make work out of it. Look at you.

Hey, I just totally made that up. And I'm sure we'll get tons of listener mail saying, Joss is so wrong, he couldn't be wronger. Actually, somehow an apple stray is really offensive. Right. So Brinkley hesitated at first, like you mentioned. And then the farmer said, I'll even bring you the testicles of the goat and put them in my scrotum.

And that's what he did. And so what we don't know is this farmer's name. And so we don't really have a great idea of how this really went, because it's not officially on record. Right. Doesn't really matter. I mean, I'm sure it mattered to him. But the long and short of it is, is that this procedure happened and word got around.

And all of a sudden, a second patient stepped forward, Mr. William Stitsworth, and said, hey, I would like this goat thing too. And Brinkley said, I'll one up you. I'll put some goat testicles in you. I will put some goat ovaries in your wife. And then Libby wrote the best sentence she's ever written for us. When she said within a year, the couple had a child who almost unbelievably, they named Billy.

Billy, the goat gland child. Oh, wow. Wow. So this was the start of something big, as Bert Backereck put it. Yeah. How much money was it? He charged him $750, which is 10 grand today, which if this were a legitimate surgery, 10 grand's not that bad in today's money, right?

Pretty good deal. But it wasn't a legitimate surgery. It was a completely made up surgery, where basically he would take the testicles, a slice from a testicle of a young goat, about three months old, specifically a Togenberg goat, which are these tiny, cute, very clean kinds of goats that don't smell I've seen, or I heard, or I smelled. And he would take these little slices of testicles, make an incision in your scrotum,

put the testicle, goat testicle slice in there, sew you back up. 10, 15 minutes you were done. And that was it. He might as well put like a Tonka truck or something in your scrotum. Like there was nothing biologically happening to this, except maybe increasing your risk of infection and genetic chimerism, where all of a sudden you had Togenberg goat DNA mixed in with your own. Yeah.

So it's not like he was, when we said testicles, he wasn't surgically attaching testicles to blood vessels or anything like that. He told people that he was attaching blood vessels, but he would, I'm surprised he even bothered to put the slice testicle in there, to be honest. Well, he had some honor in ethics. He also had a pretty good eye for advertising, and maybe that's a good place to take a break. Oh, yeah.

All right, we're going to take a break, and we're going to talk about how he sort of revolutionized PR in a way, right after this. Stuff you should know. Some people can't stay in the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything, but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes,

there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I.com, and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Something a little more fun, your extra room or extra space might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca. Fresh takes on trending topics through nuanced interviews with up-and-coming Latinx creatives. We've been podcasting independently since 2016,

and we're bringing our radio phonic novela to the MyCultura Network to continue sharing stories from the Latinx community. You can now listen to Locatora Radio as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we mentioned he's doing this goat gland procedure, Brinklius. He's a quack. He hired an advertising consultant, and then later on would hire a PR person. And these were sort of the beginnings of this kind of job in the United States,

and started to get the word out in newspapers such that he got some pretty prominent patients in there, didn't he? He did, and the one that really paid off the most was a guy named Harry Chandler. And thanks to his press, I mean, he got some crazy press throughout the country. His name became very, very famous, and people started traveling to Milford. And because of this, you know, renown, this publisher or owner, actually, of the Los Angeles Times, put himself up as a patient. And I've seen either he put himself up or one of his editors up as a patient and said, here's the deal. If this is successful, we will sing your praises forever in the Los Angeles Times,

which will legitimize you in ways you can't even imagine. If it's not successful, we're going to ruin you. What do you want to do? And he did it. He worked on either Harry Chandler or his editor, and it worked in whatever way this could possibly work. And the LA Times started singing the praises of Dr. Brinkli, and he went from kind of famous to a global superstar as far as like a quack can get. Yeah. And also key and put a pin in this, Harry Chandler owned Los Angeles' first radio station, KHA, and this will all kind of come back into focus in a minute.

But things really picked up. Brinkli built his own 16-bed hospital in Milford, Kansas, a town of either 200 or 2,000. But the population was rising, at least by 16, because I get the feeling those beds were always full of men who wanted these, Arkinsacin, Arkansin. Arkansin. Arkansin goats, which he kept out back, and he would walk you out there and say, you can even pick out your goat. I mean, was he killing these goats? I couldn't find any ink on what happened to the goats. I couldn't either. I have to surmise that he did because he would order 40 or 50 of them at a time. And once he took their testicles,

they were worth nothing to him. Why would he keep them alive? So yeah, I think all these goats died. Yeah, that's the worst part of this whole thing. I know. So pick out your goat. We'll put these testicles in you, or at least part of them. And not only is it good for this, but sort of like with the medicine shows and the quackery of snake oil salesmen, he's like, he rattled off a list of other things that it would help. Right, like schizophrenia, diabetes, high blood pressure. Apparently, he did a goat ovary procedure to treat a spinal tumor on a woman. Basically, anything that could be wrong with you, he said, this goat glam procedure is going to help. And then in addition, remember,

he was an eclectic medical practitioner, so he was into herbs and tonics and tinctures and stuff like that. And he sold patent medicines as well at a time where you could make a lot of money selling patent medicines. So he had this thriving surgical practice that people would travel to Kansas to participate in. And then he was also selling patent medicines too. So he was doing pretty well for himself by this time. This is the mid-20s. Yeah. And spoiler, by the end of this thing, he was a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy human being. I saw between 1933 and 38, he made $12 million and that I did the old West Egg converter. Of course.

$256 million is what that's equal to today. This guy made that from a made-up procedure that didn't do anything. Yeah, it's crazy. And again, one of the reasons why is because he ended up becoming kind of a media pioneer. He made his name in this goat gland operation, but he did a lot of innovative things. In the early 1920s, he made a film called Rejuvenation through Gland Transplantation. You think Big Whoop, it's a movie that touts his practice. But this was 1922. People weren't really using film for this stuff at the time. So he was one of the first, I guess it was one of the first kind of infomercials. Basically, yeah. So he bought a radio station, actually created a radio station, KFKB, Kansas First Kansas Best.

It was the first radio station in Kansas and just the fourth in the United States. This is 1923. And one of the things he would do would be basically like you just described, infomercials, but on radio about his treatments, his patent medicines. He also had other stuff too, where he would have, like in No Brother Were Out Thou, where like the Root was bringing, yes, it was bringing in like just country acts and recording them and playing them on the radio. This is the exact same thing. And because it had a fairly large reach for its size, people started picking up on this and jibing on it. And he would get something like 3,000 letters a week. And based on these letters, he would diagnose people on his show, the medical question

box, right? Sorry, I was just thinking about Steven Roode in that movie and how over the top his performance was. Yeah, it's pretty good. Everything about that movie was A-okay, man. It was really great. Yeah. So he would have his medical question box segment and put a pin in this one too, because he would literally diagnose people on the air, had a network of pharmacists across the country, where he would say, go to, you know, if you're in Chicago, whatever, go to this doctor and get this drug or this tonic or whatever and start using it. Yep. And he would get a cut from it because it was his patent medicine. And then the pharmacist would charge like way more than you would for other kinds of patent medicines, because it was

a Brinkley patent medicine. So you could. Right. So he's getting all this attention. He's making a big name for himself. He's got infomercials via film, via radio. And he made a little bit too big of a fuss over himself because as he is, his star is rising, people start getting a little smarter about medicine. The AMA starts to sort of crack down a little more on quackery and things are getting a little more legitimized right at the time. The super illegitimate doctor has his star rising. And in 1923, there were investigations into not just his college, but all the kind of eclectic medical colleges. Right. And he even was like they tried to arrest him for practicing medicine at one point. Yeah. When he went to California to treat

Harry Chandler, the owner of the LA Times, afterward, California tried to get him. So like he had the medical establishment. He had this guy named Morris Fishbine, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was still very young at the time, beating the drum to go get that guy. This guy is a quack. He's making tons of money off these really risky procedures that don't do anything. And so he had everybody who had anything to do with the medical establishment now was after him basically. Yeah. I got the idea from this and other research that Fishbine, I don't think he was consumed with Brinkley, but I think he really had it out for him as this top quack who was making tons of money. I think he really wanted to take him down.

He really did. He wrote an editorial in 1930 and he described Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort. And he used his radio station to victimize people and to enrich himself. Yeah. And so basically the Kansas Medical Board had no choice but to go after him because the Journal of the American Medical Association is saying this guy is a prominent quack practicing in Kansas. So Kansas had to do something. So apparently in 1930, they sent a contingency from the Kansas Medical Board to watch him perform a couple of surgeries. And Brinkley went along with that. He performed two surgeries for them. One of them later remarked that his surgical techniques were excellent, their skills were excellent. And then they went back to Kansas

City and the next day they revoked his medical license after seeing him perform two surgeries. Yeah. They were like, you were a clearly skilled surgeon who is out of his mind. Right. And I watched this 1986 PBS documentary on him. And in it, they have many interviewed his wife who is totally in on this as much as he is. And she was recounting that story where they went back to Kansas City the next day and they revoked his license. And she was telling the story in kind of like a homespun country kind of way. She just thought it was pretty funny. That was my country laugh that I just did. And so like she was completely in on it. She was not at all like being duped herself. She was totally in on this whole act.

Yeah. So they, that hospital stays open in Milford, even though his licenses revoked. He had colleagues that were still doing the surgeries. He was getting his cut. Eventually what's going to happen, of course, is some of those colleagues going to be like, well, why am I, I know how to do this thing now. Why am I paying this guy part of my money? I'm going to go open up my own shop. And that's what OM Owensby did. He went a hundred miles away in Rosalia, Kansas and said, I'm going to do it for 600 bucks. And so Brinkley said, oh yeah, I'm going to open up a sanatorium across the street from your place. And I'm just going to start injecting people with a secret serum that I says does the same

thing as that surgery. And I'm going to do it for 200 bucks. Yes. And so Owensby is a good example of what he would do. He would alienate his colleagues because he would do things like bite their ear off when they tried to keep him from stabbing a patient. He would, he went on huge drinking binges and then would keep practicing while ruinously drunk and would try to kill people. He pulled a gun on some of his early patients in Milford to force them to pay a medical bill. He chased somebody else, another patient out of the hospital with a knife. So he had a terrible reputation for violence, especially locally and among some of the colleagues that he worked with. So it's not really a surprise that anybody went off and like did their own, their own chicanery

themselves to kind of compete with him. Yeah. So what happens, of course, is Brinkley says, here I am. I'm a successful, wealthy carnival barker in charlatan who is as good at duping people and who has all these questionable ideas about modern medicine. And so I'm going to get into politics and run for governor because I think people will buy what I'm laying down and we'll take a break and tell you how that went right after this. Stuff you should know. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in,

you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V E S S I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie come alive in the rain. Hey friends, maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room you're not using. Instead of just letting it sit empty, you could Airbnb it. Maybe your roommate's going to move out and you're thinking about what to do with that space. That extra room could be that Airbnb or maybe that spare bedroom where friends and family stay every few months.

You could Airbnb that too. Whether you could use a little extra money to cover bills or for something a little more fun, your extra room or extra space might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Locatora Radio is a radio phonic novella, which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. I'm Diosa Femme and I am Mala Muñoz. Locatora Radio is your prima's favorite podcast. We're just two IG friends, turn podcast partners, breaking down pop culture, feminism, sexual wellness and offering fresh takes on trending topics through nuanced interviews with up and coming Latinx creatives. We've been podcasting independently since 2016 and we're

bringing our radio phonic novella to the MyCultura Network to continue sharing stories from the Latinx community. You can now listen to Locatora Radio as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so if you're not practicing quack medicine, you should just get into politics. It's virtually the same thing, right? Sure. So not to get political or anything, but so he ran for governor in 1930. And remember, this guy is famous nationwide, if not internationally. And he actually, he was a write-in candidate. So he was a bad guy, but he had good politics. He ran on something that you could call a proto-new deal platform, which he called sympathy for the

masses, which was good pay for workers, pensions for people who like social security, basically, free medical care for the poor and indigent. And like, it was not a bad platform at all, especially coming from a really bad guy. So it's almost like he, he was a true believer in his own politics. I think I don't know that he was necessarily doing it to fleece the masses, although I'm sure he would have when he became governor. But he was running at a time where, again, people distrusted the people in charge, whether it was the experts at the AMA, or the people who'd been running Kansas and then Washington. And he was running as this every man who, who like was not an expert, hated experts just as much as the rest of you had no experience,

but was still a great leader. And so he got voted for, I think he got something like 183,000 votes out of 600,000. And he came in third as a write-in candidate. Yeah. And apparently the write-in part was a little hinky in that the, the Kansas attorney general didn't like him and made it such where if the vote were to count, it had to be written exactly as follows, capital J period, capital R period of Brinkley. And if you just wrote even, I get the idea, even if you just wrote JR without the periods, that it wouldn't count. So people look back and say he may have even gotten another 50,000 votes that didn't count for him. Yet he did not contest the election results, which is kind of surprising. And even

ran again in 1932, again coming in third place. And that's where it seems like his political career kind of wound up. Yeah. He said, forget it after that. So he lost his medical license. Remember the Kansas medical board said, you're done with this. And because of his use of, his radio station is diagnosing people over the airwaves, just based on letters they wrote to him. The federal radio commission, the predecessor to the FCC said, you don't have a radio license any longer either. KFKB is no longer on the air. So he did something that was kind of a trend around this time in the late 20s, early 30s. He decamped to Mexico just across the Rio Grande from Texas and set up what was called the border buster radio station, which was so powerful that it would

overwhelm local radio stations using the same frequency in other parts of the country. It was that it was like the loudest shout a radio station could do. And as a matter of fact, XERA, which was the radio station he founded, was for a time the most powerful radio station in the entire world. Yeah, it was by 1938, it was a 500,000 watt broadcast signal. And if you've got a 100,000 watt radio station, I don't know all the exact numbers, but that's a big market radio station wattage these days, right? The biggest, most powerful radio station in the world right now is 450,000 watts. So 50,000 watts less. Yes, it's a huge outlier. It's Shine 800, which is a religious station from Bonair in the Caribbean. Interesting. But I saw Chuck that they

could actually boost XERA to 1 million watts at one point. So it was just crazy powerful and potent. And he was using this to not just further his own agenda, but he also helped country music, not just him, but some other radio stations around the country that were kind of rogue radio stations. They would put what they called hillbilly music on and would, it kind of gave country music like a foothold in the United States at the time. Yeah, because radio, like the radio out of the east basically, was a little more sophisticated. They're playing like jazz and the whatever town singers and the choirs and things like that in the symphony. But he started playing country music and was able to sort of break bands like a regular radio DJ would. This quack doctor who moved to

Mexico to broadcast his medical quackery, all of a sudden is like one of the first, I guess, DJs for lack of a better word to play things like the Carter family. Right. So he actually stayed in Texas right across the border from a Cunha, Mexico, where his radio station was. And he set up shop again. He's like, well, Kansas said I couldn't practice medicine, but Texas hasn't said that yet. And you said that he kind of, he dropped the goat gland procedure. He did. He replaced it with something else he called formula 1020. And rather than increasing, no, no, I looked it up. Today formula 1020 refers to a mosquito spray, a pressure washer concentrate, or a solution for recirculating cooling water. Yeah. Not the kind of stuff you'd want injected into you. And he sold

it for 100 bucks for the six shot course that you needed. And this was not for sexual virility. This was to treat prostate glands, which remember that was his first specialty. He kind of came back full circle and started focusing on the prostate instead of sexual virility. And that was the first pillar of his downfall. He moved from sexual virility to the prostate. Just keep that in mind. Yeah. And the reason why that was his first downfall was because his old nemesis fishbine gets wind that Brinkley's career is kicked back in in Texas and said, well, you know what, the problem that I had with the previous operation was I couldn't get enough men to come forward because they were embarrassed that they got this operation to begin with. So I didn't have this

roster of people that were like wanted to sue him maybe into oblivion. But now that he's working on something less embarrassing, I do have people that'll come forward. Yes. By this time, I think in 1938, Brinkley had moved from Texas to Arkansas. Apparently he'd get medicaled up pretty easily in Arkansas at the time. And Fishbine published an article in the AMA magazine and what is it, Hygia? Yeah, it's a terrible name. It's a terrible name. Where he again was denouncing Brinkley. Brinkley sued for libel and that was a big mistake because at this trial, he had to like under oath basically admit that the goat gland surgery was bunk. That was suing Fishbine was the second pillar to his downfall. And like that was such a bad

move. And I don't know if he felt either indignant and lost his head about it or he felt like he had to defend himself or else he was basically tacitly agreeing that he was a charlatan or a quack. I don't know. Sort of the hubris of the wealthy too, you know? I could see that because again, he's got a quarter of a billion dollars at the time. I could see him just thinking that he's unlike anyone else. So yeah, it probably was hubris. So on the stand, he admitted that yes, he knew that the goat gland operation didn't work. And he lost that case and he took it to the court of appeals. And the appellate court said this, quote, he was indeed a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary well understood meaning of those words. Like you all know what that means.

So therefore Fishbine could not have been engaged in libel because the court found that he actually was a quack. He actually was a charlatan. So now not only was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association saying he was a quack, an appellate court in, I think, Texas said the same thing. So he fell pretty hard pretty quickly from that moment on. He did. Now this opened him up for malpractice suits. I believe three million bucks and damages back then is about 60 plus million today. He had his radio station still until the Mexican government came along and confiscated XERA again for just radio malpractice, I guess. And he started to suffer health problems. When he lost that radio station, that was a big

emotional blow to him. He suffered what's called a coronary occlusion, big time heart trouble. He didn't rest like the real doctor said he should. He got a blood clot that went to his leg. That leg was amputated and then his family fell into bankruptcy in the 1940s, right? Yeah, from all the lawsuits that he was having to defend and pay off. Then finally in Little Rock Ark and saw a grand jury indicted him for male fraud along with many and then six other members of his medical practice and he never made it to trial. He died before it could come to trial. He died on May 26, 1942. So he's never actually convicted of anything as far as I can tell. He just lost a civil case and then was definitely about to be convicted of male fraud, but he died

before he could be. Yeah. What is that? 57 years old? Yeah, not that old. Yeah, not that old. And that is, yeah, that's John Brinkley's story. Could be a movie, but I feel like movies like this don't do well, so they don't even make them anymore. No, he's not at all sympathetic. And if you made him sympathetic, you would be using a lot of license. Well, I think it might have to be told through the lens of fishbine. I guess so. I guess so, sure. The dogged pursuer of truth. Yeah, played by Sam Rockwell. Yeah, although Rockwell seems like he could have been Brinkley. Oh, he could do either one. Why don't you just make him both? Pay him one salary. That's what you do. Yes. Okay, well, since we came up with the great

structure to a movie on this, I say it's time for a listener, ma'am. All right. Hey, guys. A long time listener. I recently moved to Nashville for work, so I was excited when the Grand Ole Opry episode came out. This is an old one. Okay. I attended my first show at the Ryman just a few weeks ago and really enjoyed the episode, but I got a promotional email from the Ryman with a feature called Celebrating the Women of the Ryman's History. I want to tell you about Lula C. Naff, who is responsible for bringing the Grand Ole Opry to the Ryman Theater. She was definitely making her own way in a man's world, often going by L. C. Naff, and her gargantuan contributions

to the music scene in Nashville seem to be all but forgotten. She was working as a bookkeeper for an agency that booked performances at the Ryman. When the agency dissolved, the widow Lula needed a way to continue to provide for her daughter, an aging mother, so she convinced the Ryman's board to let her rent the space and put on the events. Lula recalled herself an un-reconstructed rebel and was known for being difficult, but the Ryman's museum curator says she got the building out of debt, brought a powerful variety to the building's state, and defended the public's right to see whatever entertainment they desired when she challenged the board of censors' attempt to block a performance. Seemed like a real rock star,

and that is great additional information from Katie. Thanks a lot, Katie. Appreciate that. We definitely, I don't recall her name at all, do you? I don't think so, but Lula sounds like she might deserve her own episode. Or a movie starring Sam Rockwell. That's right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Katie, right? Yep. Did, you can email us. Thanks, by the way, Katie, at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio,

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Hey everybody, Chuck and Josh here from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. And we are hitting the road to continue our 2023 tour in three great cities, right? Yep. May 4th, 5th, and 6th will be in D.C., Boston, and Toronto. And you can get tickets to those shows by going to linktree slash S-Y-S-K. And we'll see you guys in May. And you have to do what we say because all that rhymes. Looking for a show where you don't have to look far to see yourself? Welcome to the Professional Homegirl Podcast. I'm your host, Ebony. And every Tuesday, I interview women of color from all walks of life. And all of my guests are anonymous.

So you are here stories from survivors to spirituality and family secrets. And let's not forget about the professionals out there, okay? Listen to the Professional Homegirl Podcast with Ebony. Presented to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.