"The Great Rejuvenator"

Reprinted from the "Medical Hucksters" series [1948] in The American Weekly
By Morris Fishbein, M.D. and William Engle

Sometimes John Romulus Brinkley, mild-eyed and stubby, used to stroke his blond goatee and say that perhaps he was moving in a gaudy dream.

His gaze would flicker from the 14-carat diamond on his pudgy right hand to the 11-carat diamond on the left.

He would glance toward a picture of his biggest yacht, the "DOCTOR BRINKLEY I," back to the 16-cylinder red car with his name 13 times emblazoned on it in gold, and come to rest on the arched electric sign spelling "DOCTOR BRINKLEY" against the sky above the gate to his broad, $200,000 Texas acres.

If an old crony were with him, he would speak then with abrupt candor, "For a poor boy, up from bare feet in Jackson County, N. C., this, dog me, is something!"

It was the heyday of the most flamboyant medical charlatan America has known.

He, bejeweled and beloved and denounced, got into big money. His folksy radio voice and his panaceas prescribed for patients he never saw in the late 1930s and early 1940s brought him a fortune.

With a goat gland transplant for vitality, he caught public fancy in the last generation and he graduated in our own generation to the lusher field of cure-alls.

From Nantucket to San Fernando today homes keep his name alive although the once familiar voice is still. In many a living room he yet seems present and awesome. There are many people, too, who remember him when they go out to their family plots sometimes on Sunday afternoons and stand beside new headstones.

In the neat little town of Del Rio, Tex., the hill boy turned prophet came in the last decade to the time of his magnificence.

Flushed by the success of his goat gland transplants in Kansas, where he said he had renewed the youth of some elderly men and restored many insane women to sanity, he then advanced upon Del Rio with a single, great objective.

The Federal Radio Commission had refused to renew the license of his broadcasting station in Kansas. He had to have a new outlet from which he could advise the weary and the stricken to buy his compounds, enter his hospitals. Del Rio seemed a haven, for he found that just across the border in Villa Acuna, Mexico, he could take to the air.

He wanted to speak to America, and he told a radio-engineering firm the power he needed for his station.

"How much for the tubes?" he asked.

"Thirty-six thousand dollars," the firm's spokesman said.

He reached into his left pants pocket, took out a wallet, and peeled off 16 $1,000 bills.

That gave him Station XERA, "The Sunshine Station Between the Nations," and his claim that it was "the most powerful broadcasting station in the world" was not a bluff. It had, at first, an official 180,000-watt rating, and that was doubled. His palaver reached homes all the way to the Canadian border--and beyond.

By that time he was not transplanting goat glands into humans any more. He had perfected a "compound operation" available in his hospitals for $750, and it, according to his claims, at times relieved not only low vitality but such other far more acute human ills as dementia praecox, hardened arteries, some types of diabetes, high blood pressure, neurasthenia, epilepsy and many ailments of the stomach and kidneys.

Del Rio, population 12,000, embraced him. Homespun and persuasive, he brought it a $20,000 weekly payroll and an influx of distraught, wondering, hopeful guests who took up quarters outside the hospital. In one year he grossed $1,000,000. Between 1933 and 1938 his Del Rio hospital greeted 15,000 patients, most of them at $750 apiece.

He and Mrs. Brinkley, who had been licensed as he had been by a Kansas diploma mill, lived with their son Johnny in Arabian Nights splendor. He testified once that he didn't know how many cars he owned. He did remember one of his three yachts was a 170-foot job with a crew of 21.

His vast expanse of rose garden was a Texas sight. Still more bemusing was the fine bronze of Romulus and Remus with the mother wolf on his lawn.

Yet Doctor often said: "We're simple people. just as easy as an old shoe. Even in my admiral's uniform (a Kansas governor had created him an admiral) I don't get all swelled up."

He was just as folksy on the radio, too, with his broadcast beginning:

“This is Doctor Brinkley personally inviting you…”

His literature had the same homey quality.

“Both Doctor and Mrs. Brinkley are by nature kindly. They are friendly and sympathetic. If Minnie Brinkley lived near you she would share with you the nicest roasting ears from her garden.

“She would run over to your house on Sunday with a big pail of home-made ice cream that she thought was especially good."

In those days, in that greenest of charlatans' pastures, Doctor's evening broadcast, inviting all America to visit him, was preceded by a novelty as unique as his own performance, if in a minor way. It was the half-hour program of a blond uplifter named Rose Dawn, who for the modest fee of $1 offered to pray for any radio listener and forward a book called The Miracle Power.

It was said the book could “turn your poverty into gold" and "make your personality open like a flower in the warm sunshine."

After such eloquence, Doctor's voice, following Miss Dawn's, brought audiences sharply back to a workaday world.

“You people who are all the time grunting and groaning, never fit for anything, you are entirely to blame for your condition, whether it be financial or as to health. You have probably used poor judgment."

To all who needed medical advice, he issued an invitation.

“Every woman and every man should have themselves examined every six months and thus avoid some serious ailment. We charge $25 for a complete examination, including blood test, and you can not get a better examination anywhere. Write for the little red booklet and the story, 'Paw and Maw,' sending 25 cents for the cost of these booklets."

The $750 "compound operation," however, was the money maker. Having given up goat gland transplants, the Doctor turned to a simple surgical technique based on research by the Austrian rejuvenator, Steinach. Most experts are convinced that the apparent success of the operation in a few cases in which elderly men claimed renewed vitality was due to the power of suggestion.

Besides this service, there were sidelines. Wives who accompanied husbands could have examinations of their own for $50. Pills for relieving acid stomach were $5 a hundred; six ounces of laxative came to $3. Business boomed.

At the peak of the boom, the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners grew restive. Doctor decided to double up on his Del Rio hospital. He set up his medical establishment at Little Rock, Ark., and there he opened a 40-bed hospital for operating and a 60-bed hospital, converted from a country club, for convalescents.

The country club layout he called "The Most Beautiful Hospital in the World," and this was not a great exaggeration. A vast stone structure fronting on a 100-acre lake, in the midst of 360 acres of grounds, it was built by a Little Rock fraternal order in better times. The Doctor brought to it good times of his own.

It took a staff of 35 then to handle 2,000 daily letters. Doctor brought in a group of medical assistants. His Romulus Drug Store sold his special remedies.

It seemed that nothing could blight this venture into the field of big business. No one, including the Doctor, saw the shadows that were gathering.

The Doctor, from his youth, was never one to worry about shadows ahead.

He came up into medicine, from his North Carolina barefoot boyhood, by way of a diploma from a Kansas City "eclectic" medical school, one which was shut by a subsequent "diploma mill" scandal. The "eclectic" theorizers leaned toward herb healing and patients' hope. But Doctor wanted to get along in a bank-account way.

Herb healing was no stepping stone. So presently with a partner he opened up in Greenville, S. C., beneath a sign that said "Greenville Electro Medic Specialists." He and his partner had $10. They got credit at a drug store and at a supply house. The landlord trusted them for rent.

Salvarsan and neosalvarsan-"606" and "914"-were coming in then, and word went out that the itinerants had these remedies of social disease ready for injection at $25.

They did not have those remedies ready, Doctor's partner later confessed. They had colored water. They injected that. They did not do well. The partner went on, to end in a penitentiary for robbery with firearms. Doctor went on, to become a country practitioner in Milford, Kan.

He stayed there from 1917 to 1933, and the state liked him so well that he twice ran for governor.

Each time he almost won, and in the second try it was rumored he carried three counties in Oklahoma, where he was not even a candidate.

Meanwhile he built a big hospital in Milford, set up a baseball team christened the Brinkley Goats, and began to capitalize on his goat gland transplant.

The idea for the transplant apparently came to him by chance.

“A man came to me one day and we got to talking about why couldn't we take the glands out of an animal and put them into a man," he once explained. "I told him it was biologically impossible, but he said go ahead and do it to him. "He furnished the animal and I transplanted some glands into him.

The results were amazing to me. He said he had been an old man for 16 years, and a year later I delivered his wife of a fine baby boy."

With stories such as that to tell, he was encouraged to put his voice on the air and he got a license to broadcast. With music, he mingled praise for the goat gland transplant, and advice.

The American Medical Association began to tell the story of his lack of education. The Kansas State Board of Medical Examiners revoked his license to practice. California indicted him for practicing without a license. The Radio Commission refused to renew his broadcasting license and the Federal courts upheld the decision.

Doctor did not mind greatly. He always had a rugged resilience. He went bag and baggage down to Del Rio.

There he moved finally into the inevitable Greek tragedy of his last days.

He sued the American Medical Association and its editor, Dr. Morris Fishbein, for denouncing him as a charlatan, and lost, and he lost on appeal. His business began to fall below expenses. Creditors crowded him.

Malpractice suits had ruined him, his lawyers said. His hospitals were gone. His yachts were gone. The Federal Government said he owed $113,000 in income taxes. Judgments against him mounted beyond $1,000,000.

He kept on fighting. But now it was only feeble shadow-boxing. He opened a school for teaching airplane mechanics in Kansas City. Bankruptcy engulfed it.

His heart began to disturb him. A piece of the heart’s tissue broke away and blocked a blood vessel in one of his legs. The leg had to be amputated.

One-legged, ruined, exiled from the business world he once had so brashly invaded, he felt the darkness deepening. In May 1942, it closed in.

Copyright © 1997, 2002 University of Pennsylvania HSS
Revised: 09-Feb-2002