Goat glands and gold rush medicine: the rise of Doc Brinkley

As a lucky strike inspired prospectors to scramble for the Gold Rush in 1849, news that old men were rejuvenated by gland grafting encouraged entrepreneurs in the 1920s. Prominent among them, “Doc” John Romulus Brinkley emerged from the North Carolina backwoods with a singular cure based on “goat-gland science.” With only a rudimentary medical training from an unorthodox school (yet claiming three degrees), he nevertheless gained a flair for surgery besides native wit to entice patients. His small private clinic opened in rural Kansas in 1917 grew to attract national attention and thousands of fee-paying patients.

To focus on goat testicles revealed business acumen. Country people respected goats for their toughness and resistance to disease. Readers of classical literature (admittedly few in those parts) knew about horny fauns and debauched Roman youths using goat glands to induce satyriasis. Brinkley benefited from those stories, though more fictional than fact, to persuade male patients to seek his help in their battle for vitality.

The smaller size of testes in goats than other farm animals was an advantage. He grafted them whole into the human scrotum, anchored beside the spermatic cord with stitches. A four-phase operation was available for a fee of $750, equivalent to $9,500 in purchasing power today. After receiving a graft, patients had a Steinach operation with mercurochrome injected into the severed ends of the vas deferens. The antiseptic turned urine red, which he told them not to worry about for it was a sure sign of progress. The third and fourth phases involved hooking a small artery and a nerve from the graft onto patients’ testes for nourishment and energy. They didn’t know blood vessels can’t penetrate the tough capsule to supply inner glandular tissues or that hormone production doesn’t require innervation. They didn’t know that ischemic grafts are necrotic in three weeks or sooner.

The cany practitioner kept his methods secret from competitors and orthodox doctors, but he didn’t miss an opportunity to acclaim their benefits:

“…the glands of a three-week-old male goat are laid upon the non-functioning glands of a man … After being properly connected these goat glands do actually feed, grow into, and become absorbed by the human glands, and the man is renewed in his physical and mental vigor … For impotency, insanity, arteriosclerosis, paralysis agitans, prostate trouble, high blood pressure, skin diseases, diseases of organs of regeneration, and for prolonging life and rebuilding the human body, I know of nothing that will equal gland transplantation.”

He shared with circus owner Phineas T. Barnum a belief that any publicity is good publicity. Making an alliance of health care with religion did him no harm in pious communities. The New York Evening Journal described his services as a blend of “Old-time religion and new-fangled operations on a strange medico-gospel farm.” It featured the first goat-gland baby in his arms and, of course, they called the boy Billy!

He broadcasted country-and-western music and fundamentalist preaching from a powerful radio station that reached from the Mid-West to the Mid-Atlantic states. Listeners recalled his mesmerizing armchair chats giving medical advice to thousands of devoted followers. He knew men were too bashful to ask advice about impotence, so he went over their heads to urge wives to send them to his clinic. He knew not all women were icebergs.

The larger-than-life rogue sported a goatee beard for a distinguished look that appealed to men of worth and education. An editor of the Los Angeles Times came for treatment and so did a Chancellor of the Chicago Law School. Long before immunosuppressive drugs, xenografts of animal tissues didn’t seem beyond the bounds of scientific credibility. The celebrated surgeon Sir Victor Horsley used grafts of foreign thyroid tissue for temporary relief from myxedema before glandular extracts proved more successful. The reputation of the French Professor Brown-Sequard, previously tainted by self-experiments with juiced dog testes, turned for the better when he gave adrenal extracts for Addison’s disease and pancreatic extracts for diabetes. The sun had not yet risen at the dawn of endocrinology to shine when pure hormones became available. We can almost excuse doctors who recommended Brinkley’s services as a last resort after conventional treatment failed. He exhorted patients to give up alcohol and tobacco, always sound advice, but also from cunning mountebanks whose remedies took credit for benefits really due to self-denial and the placebo effect.

When tales seem too tall to be true, we call them apocryphal, but occasionally they are historically accurate. The sound of bleating billy-goats greeted patients arriving at the clinic. Brinkley escorted them outside to inspect the pen for choosing their donor, much as a diner might point at an appetizing lobster in a restaurant aquarium. An elderly gentleman from Boston brought a goat tied on the running board of his automobile. Offended by the snubbing of a full service, the clinic director asked why he insisted on using it for the operation. The man replied, “I know what my goat can do.”

Brinkley’s roguery drew wrath from the medical establishment. The editor of JAMA, Dr. Morris Fishbein, vilified him as the apotheosis of quackery. When the Kansas Medical Board revoked his medical license in 1929, he responded by recruiting dotards from his customers to testify in his defense. Men who paid a hefty fee were disinclined to ridicule their treatment as a waste of money. They defended their ram-parts and professed to have better health and even proved their vigor with a 100-yard dash. When the Board closed his clinic, the director moved to another state to continue in business until the tireless Fishbein caught up.

Before leaving Kansas, Brinkley played a card that might have changed his fortunes and even state history in the Depression years. He campaigned for the governorship with support from influential libertarians who held mainline politicians in contempt. His allies at the state capitol decorated him with the trappings of an admiral of the Kansas Navy (sic), including a bicorne hat, natty uniform, and a ceremonial sword. Celebrity status may have made him privately gleeful, but he presented himself as an ordinary dude suffering persecution from a medical Goliath. He never became the governor.

Knocked down but not yet out, he switched operations to relieve enlarged prostate glands. This was better business than transplants, now discredited by discoveries in endocrinology. He blamed glandular hypertrophy and declining libido on low hormone output from aging testes. The Steinach operation was his remedy based on Professor Steinach’s experiments that showed it stimulated Leydig cells to boost the male hormone. If we can strain anything positive from this futility, it is that the minor procedure kept his hands away from trying the far riskier operation of extirpating the gland.

Fishbein chased mavericks across the country like a zealous inquisitor to sanitize his profession. Brinkley declared bankruptcy after losing a libel suit for $250,000 in 1941, although that didn’t mean he was broke. The following year, while convalescing after an amputation, the US Postal Service filed a complaint that he had spread false claims about goat glands through the mail and indicted him for taking $12,000,000 from 16,000 patients. Rejuvenation surgery now approached the buffers after its journey from the altruistic but mistaken efforts of Brown-Séquard to a profitable but unethical American enterprise. [Monkey glands, the third and last topic, will be published after the next post.]

Image #1: DALL-E (OIA)

Image #2: John R. Brinkley. Trust that man?