Episode 687: John Brinkley Part II - Solace in Strange Directions

The Boys wrap up the story of John Brinkley as the goat gland man takes his bullshit to the airwaves, builds a fortune selling bogus cures, and decides to run for governor of Kansas. Meanwhile, rival quacks get in on the action, the body count grows, and one very persistent doctor makes it his mission to bring the whole operation down.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Streaming on Paramount Plus. Dexter Morgan is back. And this season, he's facing the scariest threat yet: middle age. A lifetime of blending in gets to you. And now Dexter is up against two rival killers stealing the spotlight. Taking them down means changing his MO. And things are gonna get messy. Starring Michael C. Hall, Uma Thurman, Dan Stevens, and Brian Cox. Dexter: Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  There's no place to escape to.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  This is the last. On the left.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  We're rolling.

• 1:23Marcus Parks?

  So I don't know why, but I guess it's because, you know, I've been showing Carolina at Lost lately. We've been watching Lost together. So a couple nights ago, I had this dream where I was, um, I was talking with Miley Cyrus. I was interviewing Miley Cyrus. And for some reason, she had an Australian accent. And she kept talking about how she had two boyfriends. But she kept using this phrase that, and I want to know if this is real or if this is just something that my brain made up. But she kept saying, "Yeah, I got two blades on the cougar."

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I've never heard "two blades on the cougar," no.

• 1:56Marcus Parks?

  I've never heard that. So it's not, okay.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  I've never heard that as an expression, but I will say you're always writing.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Always writing.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  Always moving the words.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Always thinking.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  You know, she was famously engaged to Liam Hemsworth.

• 2:10Marcus Parks?

  The Australian, yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  So I see where your brain made that connection.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  She also, to me, reads Australian.

• 2:16Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, she does read Australian. And "two blades on the cougar," that does sound like something an Australian woman would say who's getting railed by two men.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely. Absolutely. It's like one, like, there's a term I learned recently that was like, "Get one up ya."

• 2:29Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It's like that. Yeah, it's kind of like that. "Get one up ya" is both a drink and, I believe, a cock.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  I think, yeah, I think it's getting fucked.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  It's both, but it's also Australian, so it's like both.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Get one up there, what if, what if you're on top?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  But I'm gonna start saying "two blades on a cougar."

• 2:44Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, "two blades on the, on the cougar."

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, "two blades on the cougar."

• 2:47Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  And what's that mean, double teaming a lady?

• 2:49Marcus Parks?

  No, it just means that you get two guys, you're a lady that's, uh, that's got two guys on the line and got two blades on the cougar.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, two, two guys at one time.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  Sounds like she's hitting double team.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  No, that's called koala belly kiss.

• 3:04Marcus Parks?

  Welcome to the Lost Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for letting me share my dream with you. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zebrowski. They call him the Australian, um, uh, the Australian armadillo.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20Marcus Parks?

  Actually, yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  That's a kind of word.

• 3:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I have a wider back than a front. Yeah, which is just the truth. I have a wide back. My back's getting wider.

• 3:31Marcus Parks?

  It is.

• 3:32Speaker 05

  And you roll in a ball to get from place to place.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yes, that is because it's fastest for me. Because of my little legs, my little segmented legs and my three-toed paws.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, they go up into your body.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yes, just like my penis. Thank you.

• 3:47Marcus Parks?

  And we've got also with us Ed Larson, who I'm gonna call the Honduran hedgehog.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Whoa, God, that seems like it's, uh, you know, I'm just visiting.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Just feels like, like a big, like Ron Jeremy of South America.

• 4:07Marcus Parks?

  And today we are continuing and finishing the story of John Brinkley, the goat gland man. This is huge, it's thick, it's long, but goddamn, I love this story.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  It's so fun. I watched a little bit of the documentary Nuts.

• 4:19Marcus Parks?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Did you see that?

• 4:21Marcus Parks?

  No.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  It's a documentary, it's called.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  About him called Nuts?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Nuts! With an exclamation point. And it's all done with like, like animation. It's really fun. Go take a, it really helps pad out the world of it.

• 4:32Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. When we last left Dr. John Brinkley, he had established his growing goat gland empire in the tiny Kansas town of Milford, where a clientele made up mostly of impotent men would travel from all over the world so the good doctor could implant the testicles of baby goats into their scrotums in a bid to recapture their vim and vigor.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I think this constant traveling of impotent men is what led to the creation of the Delta Lounge.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Ironically, they're all riding the train.

• 5:02Marcus Parks?

  But while this all sounds objectively idiotic, if not outright insane, Dr. Brinkley was not the only medical professional in the early 20th century who had erroneously come to believe that human maladies could be treated or cured by tossing a chunk of animal organ into the body cavity of a patient. Also, I'm gonna say right up top that this episode has a ton of characters. Because as it turns out, John Brinkley came into contact with a lot of absolutely fascinating people throughout his career. So we're gonna do our absolute best to keep everything straight throughout.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say a weird statement here. But does anybody feel that for like, more interesting people were alive at once from like 1910 to 1930 than any other like time period? Like the idea of like more interesting people, more weird, you know?

• 5:53Marcus Parks?

  I think it's during any time of discovery.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:56Marcus Parks?

  Like any time with like when things are, are new. Because right now, we're in the goo, as Sita put it on my first appearance on the Foreign Report.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  We're deep in the goo.

• 6:04Marcus Parks?

  We're deep in the goo right now. So it, it, there's not a whole lot of interesting people around. But during, you know, 1910s, 1920s, I mean, so many interesting things. And there's so many people that are just trying whatever and are making a career out of it.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, back then, we didn't know shit about shit.

• 6:19Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and now we know no shit about shit.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, you, you would think that.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  We know nothing.

• 6:29Marcus Parks?

  Now concerning the early 20th century explosion of xenotransplantation, that's the technical word for implanting organs from one species into another.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Trudukinin.

• 6:39Marcus Parks?

  There were a fair amount of men throughout the Western world who had the same idea as Dr. Brinkley. By the 1920s, though, a lot of the action was happening in Europe. In Paris, a doctor named Serge Voronoff continued the work of Dr. Charlie Brown's secret. Charlie Brown was the guy we discussed last episode, who claimed to have cured his own impotence by injecting himself with an emulsion of dog and guinea pig testicles directly into his own sexual organs.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I'm buying it. I actually think that, that's what I'm looking for.

• 7:09Marcus Parks?

  And I wonder if he direct, because all I could read was, all I could find was that he injected it into his sexual organs. So I don't know if he injected it into his penis or his balls.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  If I was him, and I'm not, but if I was him, and I know that this is fake.

• 7:23Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to show five people by this.

• 7:26Marcus Parks?

  But you believe it's real.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Well, I, I would believe up to a point, but to, in order to hedge that, I would just stick it into the extra skin of the balls.

• 7:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, okay, that's good.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  It's interesting that his name is Charlie Brown and he was working with peanuts.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown.

• 7:42Marcus Parks?

  Dr. Serge Voronoff picked up where Dr. Brown's secret left off by transplanting various testicles between animals and from animals into humans, just to see what would happen. Now, for the most part, full xenotransplantation is still fringe science. We, of course, use porcine valves to repair hearts, but patients still usually die within days when it comes to full pig heart transplant.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  60 days was recently, we had one for 60 days.

• 8:09Marcus Parks?

  Wow.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Honestly, if I'm gonna die in two, if I'm dying anyway, like I could get you two months with a pig heart.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  But you had to get like a, you had to do like a horrible surgery. It's not like it's two months ago to Disney World and jet skiing. You get cut in half, they put the pig heart in you, you then spend two months going,

• 8:29Speaker 01

  as it works.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  But I want to watch The Sopranos one more time.

• 8:39Marcus Parks?

  Well, the most promising xenotransplants involve chimpanzee and pig kidneys. But even those are still a long ways away from being reliable. For example, the record for the longest a pig kidney has lasted in a human is still, as of 2025, only 271 days. And that was after extensive gene editing. In other words, biology is not really a mix and match sort of thing when it comes to internal organs. Although, as we shall see, many men over the years tried and failed. Although many tried and believed they succeeded, but still failed.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love some pig skin.

• 9:13Marcus Parks?

  Ooh.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, chicharrone me. That's it, that's what you want. You're talking about chicharrones.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  I want to turn into Pizza Hut.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  You are well on your way.

• 9:24Marcus Parks?

  It's delicious. I love this guy.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  You're like, that's a celebrity you most resemble.

• 9:34Marcus Parks?

  Now, in October of 1919, an American doctor made a supposed breakthrough in the field of gland implantation. His name was Dr. Leo Stanley. And he had made his so-called breakthrough in the unlikeliest of places. San Quentin State Prison, right here in California.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Now, this is sounding great.

• 9:52Marcus Parks?

  No, it's about to get real bad.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  No, I'm definitely terrified.

• 9:56Marcus Parks?

  As you might expect from a prison doctor performing experiments on prisoners, Dr. Leo Stanley was pure fucking evil. And while his experiments weren't quite on the level of, say, what Joseph Mengele did at the Birkenau concentration camp 30 years later.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 10:11Marcus Parks?

  Yet Dr. Stanley, he was still playing the same game as Mengele.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  I look up to him.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  Who do I want to be when I grow up?

• 10:20Marcus Parks?

  The most notorious Nazis of all time. Point is, though, men like Dr. Stanley were the contemporaries of Dr. John Brinkley and his goat gland surgery. Brinkley took cues from men like Stanley, all while the unsuspecting public paid the price. Now, Dr. Stanley had been hired as chief surgeon for San Quentin State Prison in 1913. But the problem is that while Dr. Stanley was a doctor, he had absolutely no surgical experience. Like, you need many, many years of training to become a surgeon. You don't just go from medical school to surgeon.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  You know, if no one's gonna let you do it, how are you gonna get the experience?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like being a bartender in Brooklyn. They want you to have experience to get experience. Bartending school is a scam.

• 11:08Marcus Parks?

  But regardless of his training, Stanley had come to believe that endocrine diseases, particularly problems with men's testicles, were the main cause of crime. He wrote poetically in his memoir that, "Perhaps the outworn glands look for solace in strange directions."

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I know when my balls are sad, the first thing they look towards is the ultimate ball, the sun.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Ah, how they wish they could be the sun.

• 11:38Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, I always wondered, like, you know, how did the writers of Deadwood, like, write, like, in that style? They're just copying guys like this.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Oh, dude!

• 11:46Marcus Parks?

  That sounds like the preacher from the first season of Deadwood. "Perhaps his outworn glands look for solace in friendship."

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Oh, God, that's right. Oh, oh. That's right. You do that good, Marcus.

• 11:57Marcus Parks?

  Thank you.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good one.

• 11:58Marcus Parks?

  We've also been watching Deadwood again recently. But the thing about California at this time, in the early 1900s, is that there was little to no legal protections regarding prisoners. So Dr. Stanley had near Nazi-level authority to experiment on prisoners in whatever way he saw fit.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Let's see if we could make him have duck feet.

• 12:24Marcus Parks?

  Well, the testis theories on testicles and crime, Dr. Stanley removed the testicles from an executed criminal who presumably had no next of kin, or most likely, the next of kin was just never informed that, hey, we're cutting out your brother's testicles after we hang him.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Honestly, I just think, like, don't let me know.

• 12:42Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Oh, so he hung, I was, like, electrocuted. It was like, how did that even work? Did they, must have cooked the nuts, but they hung him. That makes sense.

• 12:49Marcus Parks?

  I think they were still doing hanging in 1913 in San Quentin.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, why not?

• 12:53Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  Hopefully.

• 12:56Marcus Parks?

  Well, the testicles of that dead man were implanted into the scrotum of an elderly inmate. This was all to see if swapping out testicles could make a difference in an inmate's demeanor and/or sex drive.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  I bet it would.

• 13:09Marcus Parks?

  Well, after the first operation was deemed successful enough, Dr. Stanley was given permission to remove the testicles from every executed inmate, which were then implanted into the scrotums of San Quentin's elderly inmates.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  I think if you pin an elderly inmate down and you saw open his balls and you put a dead man's balls inside of him, it might calm him down. And then it might make him think about his ways.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  Hey there, son, what day they gonna kill you? Ah, nice set on you there, boy.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Let me ask, let me ask, are you part Ron Wilder?

• 13:48Speaker 05

  What the, what the, this young buck here gonna go down?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I just gotta see the big smiling elderly inmate now with four balls. Just like walk moseying down being like, you notice something different about me? Double shit. I got the double.

• 14:03Marcus Parks?

  Now, boys, unfortunately, we have to have a new policy here. Ain't no more calling dibs on testicles. There's too many fights amongst you to get the good testicles.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Everybody, everybody's just looking at me for what I've got on the outside. Nobody asks questions about Mongo. Nobody asks question about me history. Dead man walking.

• 14:32Marcus Parks?

  Now, after these initial experiments, Stanley claimed that within five days, each elderly inmate showed improvement and he, quote, "perked up." The results were encouraging, but for as many men as the officials at San Quentin executed, they still didn't produce enough testicles to satisfy Dr. Stanley's appetite for discovery. So Dr. Stanley began implanting the testicles from various animals, including boars, rams, deer, and of course, goats. Stanley eventually came to believe that gland implants could cure depression, acne, asthma, and even pedophilia, as if the only reason why certain men were attracted to children was because they had bad testicles.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Exactly. We removed them balls. He don't wanna fuck no kids at all.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just took the balls and we put them on top. The key is to put the balls above the dick. That's what keeps them from having sex with the children.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  The best way to do it, I found, is you remove their eyeballs and you put the testicles in where the eyeballs are. They can't see nothing.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  This is my best student. He is simply, I, God, I wish he was my daughter.

• 15:39Marcus Parks?

  And I tested it, too. I got an old orphan boy. I locked him in a room with old Jake for nine, six hours. Wasn't no touching.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's 'cause no one told me the boy was gonna be gross.

• 15:55Marcus Parks?

  I'm trying to lose weight.

• 16:00Marcus Parks?

  Well, Dr. Stanley then went even further. He removed the thyroid glands from troublesome inmates, and all this, by the way, is without the prisoner's consent. He injected the ground-up testicles of animals directly into the abdomens of other prisoners, just to see what it would do. With other inmates, Dr. Stanley performed primitive plastic surgery, theorizing that these men would be less likely to commit crimes if only they hadn't been so goddamn ugly. If they were more handsome and less physically off-putting, Dr. Stanley theorized, they would be able to find work outside of prison, and they would therefore become productive members of society.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I've been saying this for a long time. Ugly people are criminals. And I wish that we could fix each one. He is completely correct. Absolutely. Hair lips, I'm not even checking the fucking, the data on this. Hair lips lead to murder. The idea is make them pull out the lip, flip it in with a new lip section, man.

• 17:02Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Well, the point, talking about all this, all of Dr. Stanley's experiments, is that contemporary reports of Dr. Stanley's methods were almost universally praised, which certainly helped other mad scientists of the time, like Dr. John Brinkley, the goat gland man. In 1919, Dr. Stanley was recognized as an international figure in the surgical world, whose operations transplanting the testicles of condemned murderers into elderly inmates was seen as groundbreaking medicine. The only pushback Dr. Stanley got was from the family of one condemned inmate who found out that Stanley had removed their family member's testicles after his execution without his or their consent.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  We loved his balls.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  Hold on, you're saying I don't get to keep them?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  That was my inheritance. That was my legacy.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  My daddy's balls are not for you.

• 17:55Marcus Parks?

  Well, they sued Dr. Stanley for mutilation of a corpse, but Stanley was not convicted, quite the opposite. He continued his work, and by 1940, Dr. Stanley had performed over 10,000 testicular implants within the walls of San Quentin State Prison.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  That's like a gigantic, like, medical crime, right? Like, would you not call that, like, the mutilation, like, the mutilation of a generation of men?

• 18:24Marcus Parks?

  It's a massive, massive story, yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  10,000 operations in the span of 30 years. It's like, how many people went to San Quentin?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of people.

• 18:35Marcus Parks?

  A lot of people.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And they all had bad attitudes. Every one of them needed an extra set of balls.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  That is, um, it seems like almost everyone got an operation.

• 18:45Marcus Parks?

  Uh, you would think so, but, you know, it was probably a drop in the bucket as far as people coming in and out of San Quentin go. I mean, it is a staggering number, though. I mean, if it's even, like, say I'm wrong and it's half that, that's still a lot.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, what it says right now, it's designed to hold at max 4,000.

• 19:04Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Like, I mean, say I'm totally wrong and it's a tenth of that. That's still, 1,000 is still a lot.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  I mean, four is worth talking about.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if you just did it to one guy, even if it was just one time, it's a big story, you know?

• 19:22Marcus Parks?

  Well, Dr. Leo Stanley's testicular experiments were a huge inspiration to the leading xenotrend-

• 19:28Speaker 01

  The term "Dr. Leo Stanley's testicular experiments" sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie that was canceled. Let's continue. I'm sorry.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  I would've got that movie made if it wasn't made in America, goddammit. I hate America so much. That godforsaken, lazy, and sick Heath Ledger. He ruined my ability to-

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Make films about time traveling harlequins.

• 19:53Marcus Parks?

  Well, Dr. Leo Stanley's testicular experiments were a huge inspiration to the leading xenotransplantation surgeon in France, the aforementioned Dr. Serge Voronov. Voronov, however, didn't have the access to human testicles that Dr. Stanley had, so he figured he'd use the next best thing. Voronov began mutilating and castrating chimpanzees, claiming without evidence that the glands of a chimp were superior to human glands because chimp glands were absent of the defects with which mankind is afflicted. From my reading, this was Voronov finding a roundabout way to insert the concept of original sin into science.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  I believe him. God, it's gotta been so hard to wrestle these chimpanzees down in order to get their balls out. Just give him some bananas. I will not have a banana.

• 20:42Marcus Parks?

  In his most successful surgery, Voronov claimed that he had implanted the thyroid glands of a chimp into a teenager that Voronov had diagnosed as a clinical idiot. After the operation, though, Voronov judged the idiot to have been upgraded to a normal, and the teen was even found fit to serve in the French Army.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yes, this idiot is now ready to die for our country. Get out of here. Absolutely packed with testicles, little idiot.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Excellent, your singing voice has gotten great.

• 21:21Marcus Parks?

  And so Voronov kept implanting chimp glands into human men, and he eventually began claiming that implanting the glands of a chimp could extend a man's lifespan to no less than 150 years.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Ask these several corpses.

• 21:39Marcus Parks?

  Now, by 1921, Voronov's chimp gland implant procedure was so popular that he was charging the modern equivalent of $60,000 a go.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah.

• 21:50Marcus Parks?

  And by the way, I'm gonna be using the modern equivalent a lot because there's so much money involved here that I really want people to get a sense of how much money was involved.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I do appreciate that.

• 22:01Marcus Parks?

  Yes. Well, this caused a rush on the chimpanzee testicle market.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Oh, man, bad time to be a fucking chimp with balls, man. Being like, have you all noticed shit's getting tense? And I've started to tuck.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  You're brave. You're brave. And that first time it was done, it was done in June, which is really lovely.

• 22:23Marcus Parks?

  Therefore, the black market for poached chimp nuts exploded, causing the price for a single chimpanzee to rise 600%.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  From $2 to $1,200.

• 22:36Marcus Parks?

  Because there was money here, other doctors jumped on the chimp boat, with some offering a luxury experience.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the stuff like Jeff Die does.

• 22:45Marcus Parks?

  Who's Jeff Die?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Like the comedian, like, when you guys go get your hair transplants.

• 22:48Marcus Parks?

  Oh, yeah. Well, one doctor charged the modern equivalent of nearly $100,000 for chimp glands that were implanted into the body while wrapped in silk, which is a very, very bad idea for a multitude of reasons.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't put silk in your body.

• 23:06Marcus Parks?

  You don't put cloth in your body.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, bless, I checked. I'm not a fucking bureau.

• 23:13Marcus Parks?

  But what this tells us is that the field of sexual rejuvenation surgery was huge business by the 1920s. It's estimated that in the United States alone, there were 750 doctors offering gland transplant operations by 1924, but few were getting more attention than the goat gland man, Dr. John Brinkley.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Dude, do you know that chimp testicles are five times larger than humans' testicles?

• 23:39Marcus Parks?

  Human testicles, relative to other mammals, our testicles are actually very small.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  So they're jam packing these testicles in there?

• 23:46Marcus Parks?

  No, it's just like the, it slivers.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought they were putting the whole fucking apple in there. No, you can't waste a whole chimp on some fucking jerk off. No, you cut his balls off and then you take the scoop, the ball meat out. And then I just thought they were jamming that whole fucking lines of spaghetti.

• 24:03Marcus Parks?

  Now, I remember I said last episode, usually they were using the testicles from the young ones, very, very young ones.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I didn't understand. Yes, I was just looking at chimp balls and, God, they're big.

• 24:10Marcus Parks?

  They're huge.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Think of it as like a sliced peach.

• 24:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's horrific.

• 24:15Marcus Parks?

  Well, the way, I read a really good comparison, one of the authors of our sources, said it's like slicing a bit of like garlic off a clove. Okay. Slicing it off, just.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  See, I always thought balls were like calamaries.

• 24:32Marcus Parks?

  Hmm.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Let's continue.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  What do you mean, like little legs at the bottom? No, no, no. I just like them fried little circles. You know, I will say, last time I was playing with my balls earlier, and there's like a clump of veins in there.

• 24:46Marcus Parks?

  It's the vas, it's the vas deferens.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't touch that.

• 24:52Marcus Parks?

  We're actually gonna get into the vas deferens earlier. Those are the, the come tubes. Yeah, the, the deliver, the, the come out of, of your penis from the balls.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Oh, that explains.

• 25:03Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's the come highway.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  The pony express.

• 25:06Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, you didn't pinch it, did you?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I did.

• 25:08Marcus Parks?

  And it hurt, or it didn't?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  God, help me. God, you made it this long. You made it this far.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I got another one.

• 25:23Speaker 01

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• 29:44Marcus Parks?

  And so now, let's get really into the story of Dr. Brinkley. Now, while Brinkley had been advertising his successes with goat glands throughout the 1910s, he got a boost in profile in 1921 when he performed the surgery on an author named Dr. Sidney Blanchard Flower, who had come to Dr. Brinkley after losing access to both his creative and sexual juices. Dr. Flower was actually a bit of a charlatan himself, having written a book in 1901 called "The Perfect Course of Instruction in Hypnotism, Mesmerism, and Clairvoyance." But after Brinkley tossed a few slivers of goat testicles into Dr. Flower's sack, Dr. Flower claimed that he was so invigorated that he wrote two new books in just 15 days.

• 30:29Marcus Parks?

  And I'd imagine they were both fantastic.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no errors. None. Absolutely. Just take a knife to my. Balls. Make me ready.

• 30:37Marcus Parks?

  But more importantly, Dr. Flower also wrote a 96-page booklet about the goat gland procedure itself, which was meant to instruct European doctors on how to perform the operation. It was basically promo. The booklet praised Brinkley as a genius, and its publication only served to grow Brinkley's reputation as a leading voice in gland implantation surgery.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Do you think that, like, Brinkley probably, like, paid him to do, say that and write all that? And he never actually got the surgery?

• 31:06Marcus Parks?

  Um, no, I think he got the surgery, but he probably did pay him as well.

• 31:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I still think that these guys are all, everybody is holding these different things together by all saying it worked.

• 31:17Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Because no one wants to admit, "I went to the doctor and had someone throw a bunch of chunks of goat testicle inside my testicular sack, and now I'm just in pain."

• 31:27Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  I'm just pussing out of my bottom.

• 31:29Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No one wants to admit that, um, and it's happening a lot, as we'll get into. Now, 1922, word of Brinkley's procedure had traveled from his humble homemade hospital in Milford, Kansas, all the way to sunny Los Angeles, where it caught the attention of one of the most influential men in the history of this city. That man, who would bring Brinkley to Los Angeles himself, was Harry Chandler. Now, in 1922, Harry Chandler was the owner of the Los Angeles Times, but he was also involved, and this is just throughout his life, he was involved in the development of the Hollywood Bowl.

• 32:06Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 32:06Marcus Parks?

  The Los Angeles Coliseum, the Hollywood sign, Mulholland Drive. These are just a few of the dozens upon dozens of landmarks and projects here in Los Angeles that bear Chandler's influence. Accordingly, Chandler Boulevard, one of the main arteries of the San Fernando Valley, it was named after Harry Chandler. But while Chandler was arguably the leading citizen of Los Angeles in the early to mid 20th century, the man is easily on the level of William Mulholland. Chandler had a dark side, as these men often do.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  What? Marcus, you put the man who geeked me the Hollywood sign. He's gotta be a nice guy. It says Hollywood on it.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  Man, California used to be scary as fuck.

• 32:50Marcus Parks?

  God, it was. The, the, this, it's weird how, fuck it, like, just how insane and corrupt Los An- like, Los Angeles is so corrupt, it's boring.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  We came up, well, cause just like Vegas, in a way, because we were literally, we're not supposed to be here, man.

• 33:06Marcus Parks?

  Nope.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was like criminals that normally would have gotten run off by the mob came out here.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Well, cause the mob then filtered their money from the East Coast into creating the film industry.

• 33:19Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Well, if it tells you anything, Harry Chandler was the inspiration for Noah Cross, the villain in Chinatown, so expertly portrayed by John Huston, one of the greatest movie villains of all time.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Do you ever see that scene that Jack Nicholson talks about how, so there's the scene in the movie where John Huston talks with him about fucking his daughter?

• 33:39Marcus Parks?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  And Jack Nicholson was fucking John Huston's daughter.

• 33:43Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, Angelica Huston, yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And he was like talking about this scene where he was like molding it over in his head, being like, "Do I tell him or not?" And then eventually he was like so frightened by John Huston, and he's like, "I'm just gonna let it be in the scene."

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 33:59Marcus Parks?

  Well, besides Chandler's general evil vibe, he was also a massive and vocal proponent of eugenics, which was, of course, hugely inspirational to the final solution implemented by the Nazis.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And I do believe he had a bit of incest in his family as well. That's a part of it, is I do believe he was fucking his daughter.

• 34:15Marcus Parks?

  Gotcha.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  John Huston?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  No, this guy.

• 34:18Marcus Parks?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, Chandler. But perhaps because eugenics was also a new fringe science that depended a lot on grand proclamations that had no real evidence to back them up, eugenics was quite popular amongst the doctors in the gland implantation community. Dr. Leo Stanley in San Quentin State Prison, for example, was a committed eugenicist who sterilized hundreds of prisoners against their will. And he's, and it wasn't just like, "Oh, this person's a problem, let's sterilize him." He would just see someone like, "Oh, that man's a homosexual, sterilize him. That man's bisexual, sterilize him." And it was all at his discretion. And this was totally legal in California.

• 35:02Marcus Parks?

  California was one of 32 states in America during this time period who actually legislated eugenic policies, all to keep the so-called undesirables from breeding more undesirables. And this is decades before the Nazis took power.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  So you're saying you're having a problem with scientific curiosity?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  I'm fucking believable.

• 35:28Marcus Parks?

  Now, Harry Chandler was a prominent member of a eugenics organization out of Pasadena, insidiously called the Human Betterment Foundation. And he used the Los Angeles Times to endorse eugenics policies throughout his reign as the paper's owner, from 1917 all the way until his death in 1944. But since the surgeons implanting animal glands into humans and the rapidly growing number of dedicated eugenicists in America had a lot in common, Harry Chandler had read about Dr. John Brinkley's successes with goat glands. Now, Harry Chandler was presumably struggling with impotence, or he was, at the very least, looking for a boost to his virility, because he brought Brinkley out to Los Angeles

• 36:11Marcus Parks?

  to perform the goat gland operation on not only himself, but also a few of his editors at the Los Angeles Times. And I don't know if those men got that surgery voluntarily. He may have made them do it.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  Hey, you know, you wanna keep a job.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Honestly, I was just really proud of Rob that we went together and got penis transplant surgery back and forth. We both took an inch away.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, good.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  As a way, just in solidarity, and it was one of the, to be honest, one of the best working moments I've ever had as a professional CEO of a podcast.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  It's good to have Rob there to make sure all your plumbing still works.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Oh, gotta make sure. No reason why, why leave? Can't leave not knowing if it works.

• 36:55Marcus Parks?

  So, next time you drive down Chandler Boulevard here in the valley, remember that the man for whom that street is named actively brought Dr. John Brinkley to Los Angeles so Brinkley could open up Chandler's scrotum to toss a few slivers of goat testicles into his evil, shoveled-up little sack.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Come here, Henderson, come here. Let me see. You said you're gonna get me a new weather report for this weekend. Let me take a look at this. Yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Mr. Ch- I'm so sorry, Mr. Chandler, it's gonna rain, and I know it's your birthday. Sounds like somebody needs some goat balls inside of them. Go to my butt, go, my butt, my goat ball, man. You know what your balls do, Mr. Chandler? A bike path.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  How dare, I will, I dare you. I will not allow a trolley system to be built on my balls.

• 37:47Marcus Parks?

  Now, John Brinkley did not have a license to practice medicine in California. This was back in the days where you had to get a medical license state by state. So Harry Chandler used his power and influence to get the California State Medical Board to grant Brinkley a 30-day license. Chandler was the first to get the operation. But after word spread, Brinkley also operated on a number of unnamed silent movie stars. But while we don't know who those goat glanded stars were, we do know that Brinkley's procedure was talked about enough around Hollywood to inspire Buster Keaton to include a goat gland gag in his short comedic film Cops, filmed in 1922.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Glad boys, glad boys.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  What you gonna do? What you gonna do when they come on you?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Wow, very good.

• 38:37Marcus Parks?

  Well, the gag in Cops involved Keaton taking his horse to a goat gland specialist to reinvigorate the animal. And after the horse got the goat gland implants, the horse is suddenly faster and more energetic. It's very funny. But weirdly, the scene was censored because talk of testicles was considered obscene in some markets. The scene was actually lost for decades, but was actually rediscovered in 1980.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Now, comedians have been shitheads forever. That's just really awesome. That's awesome about that, too, cause you know what that is in terms of if you're a comedy history nerd? Is that the first example- Of making fun of LA for its obsessions.

• 39:14Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, like it's probably one of the first.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  It's up there.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  That's like, uh, that's making fun of LA for plastic surgery, peptides, all the fucking shit. That's so funny. It's just always been this way.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  Do you think that the silent film stars that got the goat gland surgery weren't able to be in the talkies? Because afterwards they spoke like this.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  This is what I had on pitch first day. It's not gonna work at the talkies.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Cut it from the record.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Cut it from the record, bro.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  Hi, my name is Charles Chaplin.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Lose the voice. Do a dance with the biscuits. That's your film right there. Do a dance with the biscuits. Wear the hat. Right now, get the little boy. That's your little kid now, okay? Stop with the voice.

• 39:54Marcus Parks?

  Here's another bit of Hollywood trivia for you is that while Buster Keaton was filming this movie, it was right in the middle of Fatty Arbuckle's murder trial.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  What?

• 40:04Marcus Parks?

  Uh, yeah, so, and the whole movie is like this sort of like Kafkaesque, you know, like he keeps getting arrested. He doesn't know what's going on and they say that it was possibly like, it, at the same time, it was also, uh, maybe inspired by Fatty Arbuckle's trial because the two of them were former collaborators.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  I really do want to do it someday.

• 40:23Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  It's a fascinating story, you know, I'd go through all of the stories inside of Hollywood Babylon.

• 40:28Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Cause they're fascinating.

• 40:30Marcus Parks?

  They're fascinating. They're not true.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  They're not true, but you can then go to what are the, what are the things that are true?

• 40:35Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Which could be very interesting.

• 40:37Marcus Parks?

  Now, we don't know exactly how many operations Brinkley performed on Angelino's during those 30 days in California, but Brinkley performed the goat gland procedure on a sliding scale. He charged anywhere between $500 for what he called the poor folks to $2,000. That was what he called the businessman package.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  That's actually very smart. It's pretty progressive.

• 40:59Marcus Parks?

  No, it's, it's just, it's smart, man.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  It's getting balls in you.

• 41:03Marcus Parks?

  Because it is getting as many customers as you can possibly get. And if you could not even afford the $500, Brinkley also sold a kind of do it yourself kit. Through mail order, a man could spend a hundred dollars on a special gland emulsion, which came with a rectal syringe, so the mystery liquid could be anally self-administered.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Honestly, they're, they're doing fine. You know what I mean?

• 41:31Marcus Parks?

  Oh, those guys.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Just shooting some fucking saline up your butthole and getting salt water from a guy and shooting it up your butthole is definitely way less invasive.

• 41:39Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, I mean, it was probably just, I mean, considering how many times Brinkley did something like this, it was probably just water and food coloring. So, these guys are just giving themselves enemas.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  But then they might have a clean butthole for the very first time in their lives. Cause remember how I felt?

• 41:56Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  When I first fully cleaned my butthole, properly cleaned my butthole?

• 42:00Marcus Parks?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  It was like, I was like a little girl in a field. It was like I was Sydney Sweeney trying on underwear. Like I felt incredible.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  I didn't know analine had two L's.

• 42:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it does.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Let's move on.

• 42:19Marcus Parks?

  But as far as Brinkley's surgeries during that first.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  That's gonna help him in Scrabble.

• 42:23Marcus Parks?

  It really is.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's been thinking about, that's a good way to, you know, maximize his Scrabble scores.

• 42:29Marcus Parks?

  But as far as Brinkley's surgeries during that first trip out west went, Brinkley had made $40,000 by the end of those 30 days, which today translates to over 700,000. So, he did a lot.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  That's my man.

• 42:45Marcus Parks?

  But Brinkley had also discovered that there was indeed gold in them their glons. And the goat glons were only, were only the beginning.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  That made me laugh.

• 42:58Marcus Parks?

  Thank you. Well, if a patient, if a patient had the modern equivalent of $200,000, Dr. Brinkley would implant human testicles into a patient. But unlike Dr. Stanley, Brinkley did not have executed prisoners from which he could harvest human testicles.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:14Marcus Parks?

  These testicles, however, still had to come from somewhere. So, Brinkley inadvertently created a black market for human testicles, just as Dr. Voronoff had done with chimpanzees. This market was mostly fueled by desperate young men who were willing to sell their own testicles. But it was rumored that unwilling young men were kidnapped and castrated to feed Dr. Brinkley's testicle demand. Now, as far as we know, there were no criminal cases in which anyone was prosecuted for such a crime. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I would not, however, have expected those stolen testicles to arrive in good working order.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  No, ICE wasn't very popular back then. I know that much.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  So hard to get. So hard to get. You had to get those big pincers, you know, to get the big block.

• 44:01Marcus Parks?

  Just a kid showing up like, "Hey, I got a coffee can full of testicles."

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're exactly who I wanted to see this morning. I love the idea too of, I can see being young and just being like, "Just fucking take one." It's not even doing anything for me, man.

• 44:16Marcus Parks?

  Can I sell what?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  You just have, have it, man. And then also you knock him out, you cut the ball out, he wakes up, he's like, "Oh my God, what happened?" And then you know he's just carving off some money to the guy, just being like, "All right, now get out of here, you single unit motherfucker."

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, he'll never know.

• 44:31Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, no muss, no fuss.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Right? Cause if you get one ball removed, you still come the same amount of ropes.

• 44:38Marcus Parks?

  Totally fine, yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  Not the same amount. I imagine it's less.

• 44:42Marcus Parks?

  Side stories, LPLT, gmail.com.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  Let us know if you still come the same amount with one testicle.

• 44:47Marcus Parks?

  Now, the flurry of surgeries performed by Brinkley during his 30 days in Los Angeles drew the attention of the dreaded American Medical Association. The AMA, if you'll remember, had previously rejected Brinkley's paper about the benefits of goat gland implants on the grounds that his paper was utter quackery.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  This is like when you start to like root for, cause technically the AMA is like the bad guys in the story, you know, in this wonderful story of John Brinkley.

• 45:11Marcus Parks?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Kind of how like the EPA is the villain in Ghostbusters and they all act like they're the villains when it's really like.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Technically, they might actually be right.

• 45:20Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, I mean, the AMA, of course, has its own problems and, you know, histories with, you know, health insurance and such and such, but during this story.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Marcus Parks?

  They're right.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Marcus Parks?

  They're correct in this story. Well, as such, the AMA not only tried to get Brinkley's license revoked, they even tried to get him extradited back to California to face charges and fines related to the goat gland procedures. But thanks to Harry Chandler, Brinkley already had friends in high places. And when the AMA came after Brinkley for the first, but by no means the last time, none other than the governor of California himself stepped in on Brinkley's behalf to strike down the AMA's case. Now, after Brinkley conquered Los Angeles in just 30 days, he and his wife, Minnie, spent the next couple of years taking their show on the road. Together, John and Minnie performed goat gland surgeries in not just major cities around the United States,

• 46:13Marcus Parks?

  but in Mexico, China, Vietnam, Egypt, and a whole host of European countries.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  This is fantastic.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  I can't believe no one shot him in the head.

• 46:23Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, no, I, I can't believe it either.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  It's cause I do believe the secret power is to do embarrassing things to people. And then they don't want to talk about what embarrassing thing they chose to do to themselves. Cause I imagine once you realize that you're just got rotting flesh inside your balls and you're sitting there and you're, once all it goes away and it doesn't work anymore, you probably feel a bit sheepish.

• 46:45Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 05

  And he's already out of town.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's gone.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  He's already in Vietnam and you couldn't walk for those four weeks when you were getting really mad about it.

• 46:52Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 46:53Marcus Parks?

  Well, in Italy, Brinkley actually had a brief residency at the University of Pavia, so he could pay for a full-on medical degree that could not be argued against, unlike his more dubious degrees in America. That Pavia degree was invaluable because it allowed Brinkley to basically obtain a medical license anywhere he went.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  I know that this is extremely ignorant and it's very, very even silly to say, but there's something about the idea of an Italian doctor that I don't trust for some reason. There's something about Italian doc, cause I could just be him and be like, "Eh, eh, smoke a cigarette." You know, be like, "Eh, why don't you, uh, get the fuck out of here." Like, I just feel like that's what he would do eventually.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  I have to fall down a flight of stairs in Italy to knowingly go to an Italian doctor.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  But I'm certain that they, I know it's a modern country and they have hospitals. That's all I'm saying. But you know, there's something about a guy with a braid, a mustache coming in going, "Eh, your wife, she's so beautiful."

• 47:56Marcus Parks?

  Now, the AMA saw this as an extremely dangerous development and it was, like, it's.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause it legitimated, you made him legit.

• 48:05Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it made him legit everywhere around the world. So, the AMA contacted Italian authorities in 1925 and appealed to none other than the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini to get Brinkley's degree rescinded. Mussolini, of course, didn't give a shit about any of this. Why the fuck you bother me? So, Brinkley kept his degree from the University of Pavia and never had to worry about credentials for the rest of his life.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  I'm an Italian doctor.

• 48:34Marcus Parks?

  He did, however, have to worry about the AMA, so he began to fight back. Once Brinkley returned to Milford, Kansas from his world tour, he eventually hired a preacher from the local Methodist church to denounce modern AMA-approved medicine as ungodly. The minister naturally advocated for Brinkley's methods instead, which were more Christian than what the science worshippers at the AMA were peddling.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Nothing is as Christian as a black market human testicle, like the black market human testicles. Uh, pinning a bunch of chimps down and removing their balls, taking them out, popping them in there. Christ would have loved this.

• 49:12Marcus Parks?

  But God's men, uh, you know, earth is man's domain.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I get it. I know. I love it. I like frog raw.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  If you can't fucking buy off the government, there's always a priest.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  That's a good, that's a good tip.

• 49:25Marcus Parks?

  As I said last episode, the only thing that gave men a boner after they got the goat gland surgery was the placebo effect. This was partly because Brinkley was able to talk a good game about the procedure itself. And specifically, Brinkley knew how to talk about it in a way that would appeal to Americans. Remember that Brinkley came from Appalachia, rural America, and he knew how to explain his procedure to Americans in a homespun, folksy way that almost made him sound like something of a farmer. When asked exactly how the goat gland procedure worked, Brinkley said, quote,

• 50:01Speaker 01

  "I suppose a goat gland is a good deal like a potato. You can cut a potato all in pieces and you plant it and every eye will grow."

• 50:12Speaker 05

  So you're saying I'm gonna have Irish balls?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yes, but we can reverse that. We can reverse the Irish balls disease. Uh, yes, you heard it here first. Goat glands are like a starfish. Your balls, they always grow back.

• 50:29Marcus Parks?

  While Brinkley had this homespun charm, he was a master at balancing the potato talk with scientific jargon that all sounded very impressive.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  It's very L. Ron Hubbard.

• 50:40Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. For example, when Brinkley was in Italy, he finally gave his goat gland procedure a name that made it sound official and trustworthy. Goat gland surgery sounds fucking stupid.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:51Marcus Parks?

  So Brinkley instead began calling it the four-phase compound operation.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 50:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I want one.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go.

• 51:00Marcus Parks?

  Besides just giving it the name, Italy was also where Brinkley actually refined the procedure. Although, when I say refined, it's still all utterly useless.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. But maybe he could do it faster?

• 51:12Marcus Parks?

  Well, it's just, it's, it has to look good and it has to sound good and it has to have a, uh, it has to have an order to it. And if it's standardized, then it's like, oh, it's standardized. So, oh, this has to work if he's doing it every time.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  He has to at least be getting better at opening up and stitching closed ball sacks.

• 51:30Marcus Parks?

  Depends on how drunk he is.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. I imagine, yeah, it's like, can they walk away or not?

• 51:35Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. And a lot of times they couldn't, because a lot of times he was very drunk.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's the goat glands working the magic. That's the fifth phase of the compound operation in which you cannot walk and it does not work.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  Once I put these goat balls in you, you're gonna climb a mountain so good, boy.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  You're gonna love it. Your teeth, he gonna get tiny. You're gonna fucking go all sorts of diagonals.

• 51:56Marcus Parks?

  Well, first, here's, here's how the procedure of it, this is how he standardized the procedure. First, he would slice slivers off the testicle of a three-month-old Toggenberg goat and toss the slivers into one side of the male patient's open scrotum.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 52:11Marcus Parks?

  He would then block the vas deferens. Those are the, the come tubes that you were pinching earlier.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Oh, they're fun. Yeah, come tubes, got it.

• 52:18Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, but he would just block them on that one side. This, of course, was just a bit of stagecraft. Dr. Brinkley said that he had to block the come tubes because, quote,

• 52:29Speaker 01

  "If part of the secretion of the new gland were not restrained, the patient would be given to, uh, lascivious use of his power."

• 52:40Speaker 01

  He'd have too much fun. He'd have too much ball energy.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Which I do understand, he would.

• 52:47Marcus Parks?

  So after Brinkley blocked off the vas deferens, he would transplant a blood vessel and a nerve to the reinvigorated testicle, claiming that this would give sufficient blood supply for the transplant. It would also serve to increase, quote, "nerve energization." In reality, none of this did nothing for anyone or anything. But again, it all sounded very good.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  It sounds fine.

• 53:12Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, nerve energization, that, that sounds like the very like 1920s, uh, you know, phrase.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, just make up words.

• 53:20Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah. But because Brinkley wasn't doing anything resembling actual science or medicine, the entire four-phase compound operation could be done in 15 minutes, 20 minutes tops. And then Brinkley was, of course, ready to take on the next patient.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  I always look for speed. That is my thing. I want it fast.

• 53:41Marcus Parks?

  With surgery?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, quantity. I like to be in a factory-like setting.

• 53:46Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I wish that when I went to the doctor, I was more like sitting on a conveyor belt. And I would just go through and a machine would just come up to me and just jab needles in my eyeballs.

• 53:56Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  You get me?

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Fat, fat.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Fat, fat, fat, skinny, fat, fat.

• 54:03Marcus Parks?

  Because Brinkley had brought the operation down to just 15 minutes, he was able to process 50 patients a week at his hospital in Milford. To meet the ever-growing demand, Brinkley's wife, Minnie, also got a full medical license so she could do goat gland surgeries too. They even brought in Minnie's brother, Dr. Tiberius Jones.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  That's me, Tiberius Jones. I cut balls from across the room. I brought us.

• 54:31Marcus Parks?

  Before long, there was a whole staff of doctors doing so many goat gland surgeries that Brinkley's hospital was blowing through 40 to 60 goats a week.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ, he was the, he's the Dr. Mangle of goats.

• 54:45Marcus Parks?

  But the medical reality of Brinkley's four-phase compound operation was not as rosy as Brinkley was making it out to be. What was actually happening within the scrotums of these poor suckers was that the slivers of goat testicles were, at best, being absorbed into the body harmlessly. Or, at worst, they were rejected by the body outright, which resulted in a large number of infections. So you remember that Brinkley was a bad drunk and sometimes the drink led to laziness. Brinkley would later admit to sometimes implanting goat testicles into random spots on the patient's body by just cutting open a layer of skin, tucking in a little bit of goat gland, and sewing it back up before calling it a day.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  Just like, for no reason.

• 55:32Marcus Parks?

  For no reason, just like, I'm gonna, this is what I'm gonna do today. Just, I'm gonna do this for this right now. I wanna do this, I'm gonna see what happens.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  This guy's got big tits. He's gonna get big tits. I wanna put some goat testicles in his big tits.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  I can get it, put some on his belly button. As you want to do, I put some on his eyelid. Do whatever I want, I'm fucking god, I'm god. The man was so much fun.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Now, in your research, did they always kill the goats? Or were there a bunch of sterile goats running around this town?

• 55:59Marcus Parks?

  Well, they were all baby goats, so it's the same, I think it was.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  It had to have killed them.

• 56:04Marcus Parks?

  I don't think so.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  You don't think that removing the goats from a baby goat?

• 56:08Marcus Parks?

  It's neutering, yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it's the same as you do with a kitten or a puppy.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Great.

• 56:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, and they, and he was doing it with three-month-old goats, so I would imagine he made a, a good side business.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Selling goat meat?

• 56:19Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, doing goat meat.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Marcus Parks?

  Because remember, he, because remember he had worked in that packing plant for a long time?

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:25Marcus Parks?

  So I'm, I'm sure it was a good side business for him, but he actually, he didn't really need it because, as we're about to get into, the money he was making off of this is unfathomable. But even when Brinkley was doing the full four-phase compound procedure, many patients who had goat gland surgery quickly found themselves inflamed and infected. But Brinkley quickly came up with a system to handle those patients who were more sensitive to foreign bodies floating around their innards.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  This is it. I have this, the, the solution is designed and says, "Go away, you fucking pussy."

• 56:59Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you get out of here, right? You can't, you can't hack a candle, joke? Can't handle joke, I blame the audience.

• 57:07Marcus Parks?

  Well, once the operation was done, Brinkley shuttled patients out of his hospital as quickly as he could because complications were common and extremely painful. And with such, those who had to stay in Brinkley's hospital because of the complications were starting to talk new patients out of going through with the surgery. And you also don't wanna walk into a hospital and like have four rooms full of guys going, "All my balls, I fucking hurt."

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Stop doing it. Cut that. Guy out of here.

• 57:39Marcus Parks?

  Want to solve this problem, Brinkley rented out the town hotel in Milford to keep his unhappy patients from speaking to the newly arrived rubes. Patients would be sequestered in this hotel until they were healthy enough to leave, which could take weeks, or in some cases, months.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Listen, before you go in there, you don't want to go over there, they're all moaning and stuff, it's the complaints room, we don't people, we don't have people go in there, you don't want to go over here, it's called the naked nurse room. You don't want to go spend some time in there, alright, remember that those balls are gonna go to good use, where I'm saying, alright, let me go to go hit the bars.

• 58:17Marcus Parks?

  But even though there were plenty of people who were being genuinely harmed by Dr. Brinkley's xenotransplants, Brinkley was the type who was able to stay five steps ahead of all the critics and the naysayers. While Brinkley was not a pioneering surgeon, he was a fucking genius con artist. As such, he was one of the first people in the world to realize the power of the new mass media of the 1920s. In particular, Brinkley realized the power of radio, just when it was starting to spread across the United States. Brinkley had been introduced to the radio while in Los Angeles, so when he returned to Milford, he opened his own radio station, KFKB, Kansas First, Kansas Best.

• 59:00Marcus Parks?

  KFKB was on the air every day from 5:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m., broadcasting a mix of early country music, comedy, poetry readings, weather reports, and gospel preaching, all performed live. But the centerpiece of the broadcasting day was Brinkley's two daily segments. Drawing from his medicine show days, Brinkley proved to be a natural broadcaster. He soon developed a style that was designed to appeal to and manipulate country folk by giving medical advice using the tone and delivery of what else but a preacher.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 59:36Marcus Parks?

  Now, Brinkley presented himself as a homespun country doctor, but he would inject Latin terms for body parts and medical procedures in such a way that sounded impressive, but didn't make him sound too terribly highfalutin'.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  You gotta trust me, I'm a doctor, I don't know much better than you. I'm gonna take these esicalta's and put them in your saxes. Now that's fancy, that's that type of farm Latin.

• 1:00:03Marcus Parks?

  Overall, he presented himself as a simple man who just wanted to help all his friends out there in radio land with their medical problems. Brinkley encouraged listeners to write in, so he could help them cure their ailments. His charity, however, had its limits, although he wished again and again that there could be another way!

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:00:23Marcus Parks?

  But as he explained so patiently in this speech from one of his broadcasts, which Henry will now perform, the poor Dr. Brinkley, ma, he needed assistance, too.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  My dear, dear friends, my patients, my supplicants, your many letters lie here before, your many letters lie here before me, touching testimonials of your pain, your grief, and the wretchedness that has visited upon the innocent. I can reply now, I can reply now to a few, just a few, others I shall have to answer by mail, but oh, oh, my friends, you must help me. Remember, your letters asking advice must be accompanied by two dollars, which hardly covers the cost of postage, setographic hire, and office rent.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  I am your friend, but not even a great Baron of Wall Street could withstand the ruinous cost of helping you, unless this small fee accompanies your letter.

• 1:01:27Marcus Parks?

  So every person who wrote him a letter put two dollars in, and that's two dollar, like-

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Just to have him read the letter!

• 1:01:35Marcus Parks?

  It's the modern equivalent of about forty bucks.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Woo, fucking wild!

• 1:01:38Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, almost forty bucks, like thirty-seven, thirty-eight.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  It's a soupy sales! He is, but this is the beginnings of like, this is a type of American, and people that come to America that we are gonna recognize quite a bit, and this is a guy we like, we like this kinda guy.

• 1:01:55Marcus Parks?

  Oh my god, America loves this kinda guy, and he's one of the very first, like John Brinkley is a pioneer in using mass media to scam idiots out of money. Now, while there was entertainment content on Brinkley's radio station, many of the shows were thinly veiled advertisements for either Dr. Brinkley himself, or a growing cabal of fellow medical con artists who were picking up what Brinkley was putting down. See, this was the dawn of modern advertising, and Brinkley understood modern advertising better than most. See, in theory, advertising is supposed to simply let the consumer know who the business is, what they do, where they are, and why the consumer should use them over any and all competitors.

• 1:02:38Marcus Parks?

  But in the 1920s, companies began to develop more insidious ways of selling as many products as possible, trying to figure out how to sell people shit they don't need. By using manipulation, half-truths, and outright lies, companies began inventing problems that could only be solved by purchasing their product, and a lot of those companies were in the healthcare arena. The most famous example of this is the mouthwash Listerine, which was originally invented as a surgical antiseptic that had little use outside of a hospital.

• 1:03:17Marcus Parks?

  But in the 1920s, the guys at Listerine learned that their product could safely be used as a mouthwash.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Hey, you see that stuff you're using to clean out the toilet? Have you tried drinking it? You're not all the way, you're gonna wanna drink it in kind of a, how do you put it, in like a bad way, in a wrong way, just with the front of your face.

• 1:03:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, this is the 1920s, no one knew what the fuck mouthwash was.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Have you thought about that, just have it be on your teeth?

• 1:03:43Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  You scared of a toothbrush? Swish this around and you got it. Sick of being gay, brushing your teeth all night, looking like a man sucking his husband's penis? Enjoy some Listerine.

• 1:03:54Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, they didn't even know why they should buy fucking mouthwash. So, to sell their product to a wider customer base, Listerine's admin brushed up on their Latin and created a scary sounding problem that had never before in history existed, chronic halitosis.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:04:12Marcus Parks?

  Listerine ads-

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  If it did exist, it existed within Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, you know what I mean? There are several men of that time period-

• 1:04:20Marcus Parks?

  Sure.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  -that had chronic halitosis.

• 1:04:22Marcus Parks?

  Well, Listerine ads basically told the public, "Your breath smells like shit, and when you're not around, all anyone can talk about is how much your breath smells like shit. You, sir and madam, are suffering from chronic halitosis, and it's ruining your fucking life."

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Directly talking to you, talking to you! I guess I'll buy some Listerine.

• 1:04:40Marcus Parks?

  Now, bad breath is of course a real issue with real causes, but the term chronic halitosis was an invention of admin to make bad breath seem like a serious medical condition that could only be solved if you bought Listerine. This assertion basically created the mouthwash industry, which is now, of course, worth billions.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  And I've made it to the age of forty-two, and I'm still not quite sure how to use it properly. Sure, now you put it in your mouth and you swish it around and you spit it out. I'm talking about when in the sequence. At the end. Some people say before. I don't trust them. I use my water pick first, and then I get in there with my pick pick. I'm sorry, I did this, guys. And then after that, I brush it with my electric toothbrush, and then I swish around my Listerine, and then I kiss Julie. And he has to kiss Julie, because otherwise, she else.

• 1:05:29Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that is true. Now, Brinkley took a cue from the Listerine model of advertising and spent a lot of time during his radio segments hinting that male listeners weren't as virile as they could, nor as they should be. "You owe it to yourself and to your wife," Brinkley would say, "to book the four-phase compound procedure as soon as you can afford it." Brinkley also used vague ad speak to bolster his own credentials. Before going off on a tangent about the reliable effects of xenotransplantation, Brinkley would qualify his claims with phrases like "leading medical authority state," or "one of the best surgeons in the United States that shows me," or "reliable textbook show."

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Hey, man, that sounds good to me, it makes sense! Four out of ten doctors approve!

• 1:06:16Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  That's four doctors!

• 1:06:20Marcus Parks?

  Now, concerning Brinkley's broadcasting, you might be thinking, "So what? Sure, this quack out of rural Kansas has his own radio station, but how many people could he possibly reach all the way out there?" But if you're asking that question, then I bet that your experience with radio is on the FM band, which did not become dominant in the United States until the 1970s. See, FM has higher sound quality, but that quality comes at the cost of broadcasting range because FM waves travel through line of sight. For example, my college radio station was one of the most powerful college stations in the country, broadcasting thirty-five thousand watts of pure alternative, KTXT FM Lubbock.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Whoa, that was good.

• 1:07:04Marcus Parks?

  Thanks.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  That was good, yeah. And then you do like noise rock.

• 1:07:07Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. They'd be like- Ding dang ding, ding ding ding. Say, "Alright, buddy, yeah, now fucking tuck, everybody tuck in, we're gonna listen to the full twenty-minute version of The Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth here. My name's Beatnik here on KTXT FM. Bung ding dang ding ding dang ding. Coming up, we're gonna do six Tom Waits songs in a row."

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Finally! I wanted something to- Drive my car off the bridge.

• 1:07:30Marcus Parks?

  It's the Five at Six with Tom Waits. But even at 35,000 watts, that only got us a range of about 80 miles on the FM band. And that was even with the added advantage of broadcasting to the flat plains around Lubbock, Texas, where there's nothing to block a signal's line of sight. This is not the case with AM radio, which was the band John Brinkley used. John Brinkley's AM station was just 5,000 watts when he upgraded it in 1927. But since AM waves travel up into the ionosphere and bounce back down to earth, their range is far superior. It's why coast to coast was coast to coast AM and how it indeed traveled from coast to coast.

• 1:08:16Marcus Parks?

  But what this means is that Brinkley's 5,000 watt station could be heard across large swaths of America. So John Brinkley very quickly became a national sensation through radio. Those envelopes, carrying $2 each, were soon arriving by the bag full. And at the height of his popularity, it was estimated that Brinkley received 50,000 letters every day.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  That's how you make money doing nothing.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  So I bet you've been waiting 15 years to give people that information.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Without having to do it pedantically and be like drunk at a bar.

• 1:08:57Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah. I do love explaining the difference between the FM band and the AM band. And it's like, yeah, I love all that shit. Yeah, no, I finally used my mass comm minor.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  That's amazing. No one uses their, their college degree.

• 1:09:11Marcus Parks?

  I use both.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:09:12Marcus Parks?

  Every day. Now, Brinkley's daily segments quickly evolved into his most popular and most financially successful segment, called the Medical Question Box. Eight secretaries were hired to go through the mail and select letters in which listeners would describe their various ailments. But let me just think, that's how many letters they were getting. Eight secretaries had to go through them.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Well, you know that, I do believe it works in a way that we're seeing now all over the place, where if you are on a lonely road, like think back in the day, you're on a lonely road and you're driving or between work or you're, you're doing long haul traveling or you're doing these things. And then this man appears on your radio.

• 1:09:50Marcus Parks?

  Oh, there's no radio in cars at this point in time. This is all people sitting at home.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  And they're at home.

• 1:09:53Speaker 05

  It's because there's no TVs.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. So there's nothing to do, right? So you're listening to this guy and because there's so limited amount of people you can hear in this fashion, this guy immediately becomes 10 times more legit in your mind.

• 1:10:06Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Because that's the most famous doctor you know.

• 1:10:09Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Is this favorite, this fake doctor.

• 1:10:12Marcus Parks?

  And every time there is a massive jump in mass communication, uh, in humanity, we really don't know how to handle it. And we, and we tend, and well, most Ameri, most humans don't know how to handle it, but there are always a small amount of con men like John Brinkley that immediately know how to take advantage of it.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Jump right into it. No, he was able to convince people, kinda like how people think that memes are news.

• 1:10:39Marcus Parks?

  Sure.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:40Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, Dr. Brinkley would read the letter. He would basically take a letter out of the medical question box, pretend that, you know, it was random. It wasn't. He'd read the letter, discuss the ailment and prescribe a proprietary drug of his own branding that would cure or treat said ailment. These drugs could only be bought, however, at a network of 500 pharmacies called the Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association. And all 1,500 people worked at Brinkley brand pharmacies across several states. I think it's like five or six, and it was all under Brinkley's control. But the genius of this was that Brinkley wasn't just selling one treatment to one person.

• 1:11:22Marcus Parks?

  With every letter Brinkley read, there would be hundreds of thousands of other listeners who had the exact same ailment. So after hearing their ailments described, diagnosed and prescribed, these listeners would also go out and buy the same product as the person who'd written the letter. As I said, John Brinkley understood mass communication perfectly and immediately.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  And it's another example of by the time you realize it doesn't work anymore, you can, you're either chopped off to like the idea of like, oh, well, you know, it doesn't work for everybody and blah, blah, blah. But there's also, it's so disparate and spread out. It's hard to go and get back and like, say like, oh my God, this all happened to me because there's, you can't, you can't get on the radio and tell everybody.

• 1:12:08Marcus Parks?

  No.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  And then you're the, the, he's not worried about getting repeat customers.

• 1:12:12Marcus Parks?

  No.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Cause all he's doing is finding brand new customers every day.

• 1:12:15Marcus Parks?

  Every day. Every time someone buys a radio, he gets brand new customers.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Marcus Parks?

  Now, concerning these pharmacies that were a part of the Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association, each one was supplied with dozens of Brinkley brand medicines that weren't too far off from the patent medicines Brinkley had started his career selling. The patent medicines, however, that was only part of the scam. Instead of only selling his own creations, many Brinkley brand medicines were generic medications that were simply repackaged and marked up to high heaven. Pharmacists would take generic aspirin or laxatives, for example, and put them into a new box printed with Brinkley's name and a patent medicine number.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  This is the American dream. Yes.

• 1:12:56Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, they call it Brinkley's remedy number 74 or Brinkley's prescription number 106. And they would charge multiple times the original price, simply because it was in a Brinkley box. With other Brinkley brand medicines, Brinkley would just mix existing medicines together. And, but those got an even larger markup.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  It makes sense. There's more medicines in one.

• 1:13:15Marcus Parks?

  Now, Brinkley's remedy number 114, for example, was an eight ounce mixture of constipation and liver medications.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  I'll clear you out.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that's all it is, right? You just, you're like, once you blow your butthole out, you're like, must've worked.

• 1:13:29Marcus Parks?

  Yep. Three ounces came from an herbal liver treatment called Lloyd's Kyanthus. One ounce was a laxative called Park Davis's Cascara Evacuent.

• 1:13:41Marcus Parks?

  While the remaining four ounces were just colored water that made it all look cool. Now, the pharmacies themselves, they made bank on these markups. But part of the deal was that John Brinkley would get at least a dollar for each sale. And that's at least a dollar. That amounts to about $20 a sale today. Multiply that, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of sales and you have the makings of an empire.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Dude, this guy was so fucking rich. Yeah, dude. Perfect capitalist.

• 1:14:10Marcus Parks?

  Dude, and we're only getting started.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:12Marcus Parks?

  Like, this is just the beginning. Now, while some Brinkley brand medicines did little to nothing, others could be just as harmful as the patent medicines of old. One patient who took Brinkley's number 50 experienced symptoms similar to cholera. In addition to vomiting that was so violent, it opened up an old ulcer and caused a near fatal hemorrhage. Another patient who took Brinkley's number 50 had to have a life-saving operation to remove part of his stomach after he showed up to a real doctor's office, cold and nearly pulseless. The weirdest Brinkley medicine, though, that had dangers all of its own, was Brinkley's prescription number seven.

• 1:14:50Marcus Parks?

  This was Brinkley's itch relief formula, which was just grease made from hoglard, sulfur and gunpowder.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  That's awesome. It's fucking awesome, dude. It's like the lush, like, you know, like when you go to Lush, but it's like Ben Hail, you know?

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  It's like, it's like, it sounds like a cook itself.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Marcus Parks?

  But the ingredients were only the half of it. Chronically itchy patients were instructed to take a hot bath, dry themselves off and apply Brinkley's number seven grease from head to toe. Doesn't matter if you're, only your arms itching, gotta apply every inch of your body.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  It only works if it covers up every part and every pore, every sec and every itch. Yeah, because you wanted to use as much of it as possible, so you'll have to buy another one.

• 1:15:33Marcus Parks?

  Exactly. The patient was then supposed to put on long underwear and gloves before going to bed.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Otherwise you'll fuck up your bed. Yeah, you literally, yeah, you just coat everything in fucking sulfur and gunpowder.

• 1:15:46Marcus Parks?

  And hoglard.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Hoglard.

• 1:15:48Marcus Parks?

  But no, but it's so it could capture the grease and let the grease do its work overnight.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I do it when I moisturize my feet.

• 1:15:54Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Well, this is supposed to go on for three nights straight. And by the fourth day, the patient was supposed to be cured of any and all itchy sensations.

• 1:16:03Speaker 05

  When a bear attacks you.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally, and it explodes when it bites into the gunpowder.

• 1:16:09Marcus Parks?

  You just wake up covered in bees.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, your least problem is how you're itchy. That's the, at that point, you're just like, yeah, now that's my easiest problem.

• 1:16:18Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, you're walking around smelling like hoglard and farts.

• 1:16:21Speaker 05

  God, it must've been so hard to be a wife back then.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  It really was, buddy.

• 1:16:26Marcus Parks?

  Or a husband. Yeah, like the, the wives get just as itchy as the husbands.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  Oh, man. Although I would love to cover Julian hoglard.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  When's your, you know, your birth will be repassed. There's Christmas coming up.

• 1:16:39Speaker 05

  Christmas, oh, for me.

• 1:16:42Marcus Parks?

  Now, Brinkley would sometimes prescribe up to three or four medicines all at once to patients who wrote in. And because his listeners were fans of the highest order, they took his directives more often than not as the only medical advice they needed. While legitimate doctors within range of a KFKB broadcast found their patient lists were steadily shrinking, Brinkley and his pharmaceutical association were making staggering amounts of money.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  This feels like TikTok all over again.

• 1:17:10Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, man. It's estimated that in today's cash value, Brinkley was making anywhere between 7.8 and 13.7 million dollars a year on the Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association scheme alone.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  That's a big gap.

• 1:17:27Marcus Parks?

  That, however, was peanuts compared to what he was making on goat gland surgeries. On the advice of Harry Chandler, Brinkley had raised the minimum price of a goat gland operation to $750. And as I said, the assembly line he created in his hospital was allowing 50 operations to be done every week. So it's any, he's making anywhere between 750 and $2,000 per operation.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 1:17:53Marcus Parks?

  And that's in, you know, late 1920s money. In today's cash value, Brinkley was making, wait for it, $30 million a year.

• 1:18:03Speaker 05

  Good God.

• 1:18:04Marcus Parks?

  On goat gland surgeries.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Get me in the business.

• 1:18:08Speaker 05

  Dude.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  I want in on the business. I could see that's why all the other con guys showed up.

• 1:18:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  There's so much money to be had.

• 1:18:15Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:18:16Speaker 05

  I'm looking at this right now. If you want to buy a goat today, it's between $100 and $800.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:18:23Speaker 05

  So today you could buy a full goat.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  That's like the price of a goat gland surgery back then. Get me fucking started on chicken wings.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  How many chickens you gotta buy to have a good time, man? You're gonna fucking murder every one of them, dude.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  I know, that's goddamn shit.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Only two on them.

• 1:18:41Marcus Parks?

  Now with such incredible amounts of money being made, Brinkley was spending just as much as he made.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  You got to.

• 1:18:47Marcus Parks?

  He bought custom Lincolns and Cadillacs, had gold-plated hubcaps, put on all of them. He had either his initials or the words Dr. Brinkley emblazoned on gold throughout every car he bought. Said he put it up, he had, every car had 13 instances of either his name or his initials.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Call me Dr. B, the B stands for billions. Fucking come on, suck my cup. Where's my pimp, Chalice?

• 1:19:14Marcus Parks?

  He also owned three yachts. He owned three private airplanes.

• 1:19:18Speaker 05

  Three yachts is a lot for someone who lives in Kansas.

• 1:19:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, well, nah, he still owned them. John and Minnie both got a taste for diamonds. They loved, they bought diamonds that were literally the size of walnuts.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  That is honestly one of my biggest sort of like guilty pleasures.

• 1:19:34Marcus Parks?

  Was diamonds the size of?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Giant diamonds, yeah.

• 1:19:37Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, yeah, you indulge every once in a while.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Every once in a while. Butt plugs. I'm sitting, I have four in me.

• 1:19:45Marcus Parks?

  Well, Minnie fashioned her diamonds into necklaces while John turned his massive diamonds into incredibly ostentatious cufflinks.

• 1:19:52Speaker 05

  Honey, guess what these look like? Balls.

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• 1:22:15Speaker 01

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• 1:23:06Marcus Parks?

  Now, as far as what his mostly rural, mostly poor audience thought about Brinkley's conspicuous show of wealth, probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to hear that they absolutely fucking loved to watch him spend their hard-earned money.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  There you go, you big old genius. I love that you got different boats for your landlocked home. I thought that's funny, dude. He needs them. You never know when he's gonna need to go gland surgeries on the high seas.

• 1:23:33Marcus Parks?

  Now, excuse me, I have to go out to the forest and see if I can find any mushrooms to eat.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  We're lucky in that way.

• 1:23:44Marcus Parks?

  There's a lot of mushrooms behind the house.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  We're lucky.

• 1:23:46Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. That's where I shit.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  That's where the mushrooms come from. We're a self-sustaining farm.

• 1:23:54Marcus Parks?

  Well, Brinkley justified his frivolous spending by saying that he had grown up poor. And since he had dedicated himself to helping other people, he'd earned, nay, deserved this lifestyle. And his fans agreed wholeheartedly.

• 1:24:08Speaker 05

  Y'all know your Patreon keeps me fucking thick in 4Ks and graphic tees.

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  Y'all know that, right? You know that that's where that goes. I'm just being upfront with you, being transparent.

• 1:24:22Marcus Parks?

  Now, Brinkley's goat gland procedure was not something that could easily be replicated because it needed that Brinkley charm to boost the placebo effect. But plenty of con men absolutely understood the scam Brinkley was pulling on the radio with the medical question box. There were soon Brinkley clones popping up all over the country, but none were as good at the show business aspect of Brinkley's scam, nor were there any that were as caustic and aggressive as Norman Baker out of Iowa. So, let's take a little break from Brinkley to discuss this fascinating character.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, none of these other guys know how to do it right.

• 1:25:00Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. Now, before Norman Baker saw how much money there was to be made by selling fake medicine over the radio, he'd already had a long and successful career as a vaudeville magician and an inventor.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:25:13Marcus Parks?

  When Baker had been a stage performer, he'd shared the bill with such acts as Madame Tangly, the psychic levitator, or the Electric Man, who had such mastery over the power of electricity that God had granted him the ability to melt iron bars.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  Madame Tangly should have been a knot woman.

• 1:25:30Marcus Parks?

  Huh.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  You'd tie her up and untie her tangly.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  You're right, Eddie, but you should have produced that freak show.

• 1:25:36Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that is true.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  That would have been awesome. You would have been, honestly, I feel like you could quit all this and just produce freak shows.

• 1:25:42Marcus Parks?

  Actually, you could.

• 1:25:43Speaker 05

  I would, I, you know, I would think that, but I, like I said, my empathy's too high.

• 1:25:47Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, there's.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  I can't, I'm not, I'm like, I can't take advantage of these freaks. I'd make sure they all get paid.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like, so I can get him health insurance.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Get a torso man, get a chicken woman.

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  But I'd be, you know how much health insurance for a freak show is?

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Actually, I'm gonna say right now, Eddie, honestly, because of the high turnover rate, because they're mostly dying of the little diseases they have, you won't have to go through a lot of premiums.

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  As long as they're keep, uh, breeding.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  I love this guy. He's the best winter's Zupconia that's ever had.

• 1:26:15Marcus Parks?

  Well, Baker was also, as I said, an inventor. He was also an accomplished calliope player. He actually invented a portable calliope called the calliophone. Honestly, Baker kinda reminds me of Anton LaVey because Baker also knew how to piss people off, and he knew the importance of having a look. Baker always wore purple from head to toe, drove a purple car, only used lavender ink when he wrote letters.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah, dude.

• 1:26:42Marcus Parks?

  But after seeing how successful John Brinkley was with the medical question box, Norman Baker decided to try it out himself, despite the fact that he had no medical training whatsoever. He wasn't even a doctor, much less a surgeon.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:26:57Marcus Parks?

  He opened a radio station in Iowa using the call letters K T N T, which stood for Know the Naked Truth.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  That's a catchy title, huh?

• 1:27:07Marcus Parks?

  Intelligently, Baker and John Brinkley actually knew each other and occasionally talked shop. But Baker was such a scammer that he actually scammed Brinkley out of a bunch of radio equipment worth $1,500.

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  So wait, you mean to tell me that this guy was his banya? That's what this is?

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  Also, you know, I mean, I'm sure he had a hard time keeping track of all of his shit.

• 1:27:32Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Speaker 05

  You know, I imagine he was able to just like, didn't even know that he gave away the equipment.

• 1:27:36Marcus Parks?

  He tried getting the money back.

• 1:27:37Speaker 05

  Oh, he did?

• 1:27:37Marcus Parks?

  And, yeah, and Baker was the fucking snake. He, he never caught, he never caught up to him.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  But when your con man get beat by another con man, I'd feel like I'd be like, ah, you funny guy, you got me.

• 1:27:48Marcus Parks?

  Happened last episode, remember? Like, they just gave, it was like, yeah, give me $200, we'll call it quits.

• 1:27:52Speaker 05

  He understands.

• 1:27:53Marcus Parks?

  Now, remember, Baker was not a doctor. He was a fucking magician. But Baker was, like Brinkley, a fantastic broadcaster, although Baker took a different approach. As opposed to the friendly and helpful preacher type that Brinkley portrayed, Baker's broadcasts were described as venomous, aggressive, and sometimes obscene.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  He did Our Root. That's what he did, man. If you don't put these fucking goat nuts up in your shit, I'm gonna fucking fuck you to death.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  Listen, you lip dick pussy. I know what you're not doing right now, fuck it. Alright, so what I suggest you do is get to goat gland stuff. Is your wife acting like a fucking cunt? I bet she is, because you're a fucking look like one. You fucking piece of shit. Alright, here we go. We got Beetlejuice coming up.

• 1:28:42Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, I mean, some consider Norman Baker to be the father of shock jock radio.

• 1:28:46Speaker 05

  Fuck yeah.

• 1:28:46Marcus Parks?

  They consider him the first shock jock. He specifically went after licensed doctors, denouncing them as educated fools and cutters. One of Norman's favorite bits was to say that M.D. only stood for more dough.

• 1:28:59Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck yeah. I'm using that shit, dude. I'm doing that every time about the doctor now, man. I'm gonna make everybody hate me, man.

• 1:29:06Marcus Parks?

  But he was also quite a bit more dangerous than John Brinkley when it came to spreading, you know, fake cures. Brinkley was not a doctor, but he had heard tell of a cancer cure created by a convicted medical swindler named Harry Hoxey.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  That is such a huckster's name. Harry Hoxey.

• 1:29:25Marcus Parks?

  Oh, Harry Hoxey. Nice to meet ya. So Baker brought Hoxey out to Iowa.

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  It's a lot of this, like wiping the brow, taking the hat off, wiping the brow, you know?

• 1:29:34Marcus Parks?

  And he turned his focus not on sexual wellness, but on cancer. Hocking this supposed cure, which was really just repackaged horse medicine.

• 1:29:44Speaker 05

  Wow. Horses don't got cancer. Have you ever seen a horse with cancer? No. Horses are strong. They're weak like people. Take that medicine, quick.

• 1:29:53Marcus Parks?

  It's giving me ivermectin vibes.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  Oh, very much so.

• 1:29:56Marcus Parks?

  Well, this, it was just a paste. It was like, it was topical cancer medication. It was normally used to remove leg knots on horses. But when Hoxey combined it with various laxatives and douches and rubbed it on his patients, it was so caustic that it actually resulted in the deaths of all five original test subjects.

• 1:30:19Speaker 05

  But here at Baker, that's what first you gotta understand. Guess what they don't have anymore?

• 1:30:22Marcus Parks?

  Cancer.

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Is that a right to have? It's a favorite place. It's the place I've always wanted to go.

• 1:30:28Marcus Parks?

  But even so, Baker believed he could make it work.

• 1:30:30Speaker 05

  I could do that. Not one horse knot on any of them.

• 1:30:33Marcus Parks?

  Nope. Now, I know this does sound ridiculous, but Baker was the type of man who made big swings. And he made those swings very publicly. For example, he actually threw a sort of medical festival in Muscatine, Iowa, where he claimed to have cured 25 patients of their cancer. Ever the showman, and this, honestly, this sounds like one of the most ridiculous, crazy things ever done on a stage in America. Baker took the stage at his festival and brought out a man who was suffering from brain cancer. The man's head was still bandaged from brain surgery, so in front of a live audience, Baker removed the man's bandages and lifted off a part of the man's skull

• 1:31:17Marcus Parks?

  to reveal the exposed brain for all to see. Baker then sprinkled a special powder of his own devising into the brain hole, replaced the skull piece, re-bandaged the head, and declared the man's cancer "God, yes!"

• 1:31:34Speaker 05

  Would I have found that the, um, it's actually the degraded parmesan works much better than the shredded. It really gets into the little nodules. That's actually the best way to do cocaine. Yeah, yeah, straight to the fucking dome, dude. Fucking put it in my head window. Put it in my fucking, I got my fucking chute. Put it in my fucking chute, dude. So now that you have experienced the miracle of Dr. Baker's brain powder, how do you feel?

• 1:32:09Speaker 05

  Same page.

• 1:32:10Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, he was charged with practicing medicine without a license pretty soon after that.

• 1:32:14Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:32:15Marcus Parks?

  Radio station was taken off the air not too long after that for being not only obscene but against the public interest. But men like Norman Baker were a direct consequence of the success that John Brinkley was enjoying with his own scams. Norman Baker was just the most interesting. There were hundreds of guys like this all over the country. So let us return to John Brinkley's story, where we will at long last meet Brinkley's nemesis.

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  So the guy, though, with the hole in the head, did he, like, die immediately?

• 1:32:45Marcus Parks?

  No, no, he at least got offstage.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  You can live around with, you can honestly live like that. With your brain exposed? Yeah, yeah, exposed. Like, you can get, they pop the thing back on. And they put the junk in. Normally, like, they put a piece of plastic over it. We just watched all the Saw movies. We know what's going on.

• 1:33:02Marcus Parks?

  No, no, no, you know.

• 1:33:03Speaker 05

  I'm basically a surgeon.

• 1:33:04Marcus Parks?

  It happened, I've watched, like, 10 episodes of Grey's Anatomy where, you know, they do brain surgery on people and they're alive and they're awake the whole time and they're asking questions. Yeah, playing the trumpet.

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  And a lot of times they'll go from that to go be on House.

• 1:33:18Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Speaker 05

  And then they'll go and be on, uh, Elementary.

• 1:33:21Marcus Parks?

  And they're fine.

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  And Bones, and they seem to be fine.

• 1:33:23Marcus Parks?

  They're totally fine. There's a whole lot of people that were in Lost that were also in Grey's Anatomy.

• 1:33:27Speaker 05

  And they lived.

• 1:33:27Marcus Parks?

  They lived. Wonderful lives. Now, John Brinkley's nemesis was a legitimately good man with the incredible name of Morris Fishbein.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  It's me, Morris. I take umbrage with what the man is doing.

• 1:33:46Marcus Parks?

  Yes, we can all guess Morris Fishbein's heritage.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  I'm from Massachusetts. I am actually Muslim.

• 1:33:58Speaker 05

  Morris Fishbein was the first guy that said, "You need a good Jewish doctor."

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  And it's me!

• 1:34:06Marcus Parks?

  Morris Fishbein was an actual doctor who had found his way into the field of medical investigation as assistant editor of the AMA's Medical Journal. Fishbein soon made it his own personal mission to investigate, expose, and help prosecute quacks. But while Fishbein took down dozens of charlatans over the years, his main nemesis for two decades was Dr. John Brinkley.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  See, I've been naturally tuberant ever since I was born. I've never need medical assistance to have an ejaculatory experience. Morris Fishbein's got the juice. I got two fresh morsel balls ready for you. I got the juice.

• 1:34:51Marcus Parks?

  Now, while Brinkley was Morris Fishbein's white whale, Fishbein investigated hundreds of medical frauds throughout his career. And as you might expect, many of Fishbein's targets were performing procedures that were quite similar to what Brinkley was doing with goat glands. One of Fishbein's earliest crusades was in Chicago concerning a doctor who had taken testicular implants to new and ridiculous heights.

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  The top of the Sears Tower.

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  That's the tallest ball surgery in all of American history.

• 1:35:23Marcus Parks?

  Now, this man was, he was truly mentally ill.

• 1:35:25Speaker 05

  I love this.

• 1:35:26Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. He, this doctor had become impotent, so to rejuvenate himself, he somehow obtained six testicles from the bodies of dead men and implanted them under his skin, his own skin, under the skin covering his ribs. So his ribs had six distinct bumps.

• 1:35:42Speaker 05

  I'm Mr. Bumpy Man. I'm Mr. Bumpy Man. I'm Mr. Bumpy Man. Come and feel my bumps. I'm Mr. Bumpy Man.

• 1:35:50Marcus Parks?

  In addition to the six rib nuts, this doctor.

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  That's what they are.

• 1:35:56Marcus Parks?

  That's what they are. There's no other way to call them. Six rib nuts. This doctor even implanted a third human testicle into his own scrotum.

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  Now I have become the Kabbalah. That's funny. Kabbalah.

• 1:36:11Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, Kabbalah. Now I am become Death Destroyer of Worlds.

• 1:36:14Speaker 05

  I voted for Kabbalah. You fucking piece of shit. I voted for Marianne Williamson like a real American.

• 1:36:24Marcus Parks?

  Well, this doctor claimed that this third testicle within his scrotum and the six extra testicles implanted outside of his ribs had given him a stronger sex drive and increased mental clarity. Fishbein, of course, easily proved this doctor's claims to be fraudulent.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  He's clearly dying.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  I know for a fact he doesn't work sexually. I showed, I showed him a nude picture of my lovely Marianne. And he had not a single reaction to her pendulous breasts, her wild bush, her absolutely beautiful sable hair on the back of her head.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  Oh, Morris, I love you so much.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yes, if someone can't get hard for you, honey, they might as well not have a dick involved.

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  Spread me open, you big creplock.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Alright, well, mind my knee nuts.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  His knee nuts grew, they grew natural.

• 1:37:16Marcus Parks?

  Now, Morris Fishbein had actually been a part of the AMA investigation into John Brinkley when the good doctor had his month in the spotlight in Los Angeles. But since the governor had overruled the AMA, Fishbein had to wait for another opportunity. So basically, Fishbein's crusade against Brinkley started in 1921.

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 1:37:36Marcus Parks?

  But while Brinkley spent the 1920s building his empire through radio, Morris Fishbein became somewhat of a celebrity in his own right, having spent the decade exposing medical frauds across the country. Like, sort of a Chris Hansen type, but for quacks instead of pedophiles.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  It takes a good celebrity to beat a bad celebrity.

• 1:37:55Marcus Parks?

  It does.

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  Like, I know that, like, that's like a dumb even statement, but if, like, even kind of looking in the position that we are in now, like, you really do need to come at celebrity with somebody else who can understand the mechanisms of celebrity.

• 1:38:08Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, you gotta fight the same game. By 1928, Fishbein had been named the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is usually just called the JAMA.

• 1:38:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the, um, the one out of Pennsylvania. Pajama.

• 1:38:32Marcus Parks?

  And so, at the height of his influence, Fishbein made it his personal mission to take down John Brinkley once and for all. Fishbein called out Brinkley in the Jama by naming him a charlatan of the highest order, while also demanding that the FCC, which had just been created the year before, intervene in Brinkley's radio show. See, Fishbein was an investigator first and foremost, and when he lifted the hood on Brinkley's empire, he started finding a lot of death. There was the house painter, who had fallen gravely ill after getting the goat gland procedure from Dr. Brinkley. Lockjaw had set in nine days after the surgery, but the far more troubling complication was the gangrene that had appeared on the incisions around the house painter's scrotum.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  Honey, your balls smell like cheese.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Hopefully it's cheese you like.

• 1:39:24Marcus Parks?

  Another doctor tried to intervene after the gangrene set in, but help came too late, and the house painter died a horrific, lingering death as a direct result of John Brinkley's haphazard style of medicine.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  I'm thinking he could survive if we just cut off his bottom half. We just saw him through the belly button, he might live. Yeah, all the stuff fell out.

• 1:39:47Marcus Parks?

  No.

• 1:39:47Speaker 05

  You only painted half the house. You think we still have to pay the wife?

• 1:39:52Speaker 05

  That's scary. It smells terrible in here.

• 1:39:56Marcus Parks?

  Well, Fishbein then began contacting other doctors, who had observed Brinkley's operations. And one doctor said that he watched as Brinkley just sort of moved around arteries and nerves in a patient's scrotum like so much angel hair pasta, for no reason that the doctor could surmise.

• 1:40:14Speaker 05

  Ooh, don't do this, Marcus. I love angel hair.

• 1:40:20Marcus Parks?

  This doctor then saw Brinkley put mysterious little pellets into said scrotum before sewing the man back up, had no idea why he did it, what they were.

• 1:40:29Speaker 05

  Altoids.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  It's to kind of cover up some of the, some of the little smack.

• 1:40:35Speaker 05

  It don't smell too good, we're gonna put some Altoids in it.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Just gonna spray some Benac on the tip of his cock.

• 1:40:39Marcus Parks?

  It's actually caviar.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Oh, nice.

• 1:40:43Marcus Parks?

  But while those are disturbing stories, the sad testimonies came from the many, many men who found that the placebo effect wore off very quickly after the goat gland surgery. See, most men did come away from the surgery feeling reinvigorated, but it's thought that much of their returned vim and vigor came from not just the placebo effect, but from the massive vitamin injections that Brinkley gave them along with the surgery.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  And god knows what that meant by vitamin injections and what was even fucking in that shit.

• 1:41:13Marcus Parks?

  Who knows?

• 1:41:14Speaker 05

  Fucking him in the ass.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Make sure, make sure the needle takes.

• 1:41:19Marcus Parks?

  And that's just the ones whose biggest problems were being sad about the boner cure not working.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:41:24Marcus Parks?

  One man reported that he experienced complications almost immediately after Minnie Brinkley finished the 15-minute surgery. This patient tried telling Minnie Brinkley that something was wrong, but she waved him off and told him to go to sleep and forget about it. The man's health continued to falter, but he was, like so many others, shuffled out of the hospital and into the hotel. An infection set in, and while the man was not specific about what exactly happened to his junk, he did say, quote,

• 1:41:57Marcus Parks?

  "I'm a ruined man, physically."

• 1:42:04Marcus Parks?

  Brinkley's fuck-ups, however, were not just limited to goat gland operations. Yet another patient said that after Brinkley operated on his prostate, Brinkley plugged up the bleeding wound with a piece of rubber from a boot heel.

• 1:42:18Speaker 05

  Ooh, he wiped it off. Hey, you know, I just, my go-to always is the wine cork. It's natural, get a little red wine in ya.

• 1:42:29Marcus Parks?

  Sure. Well, one survivor of a Brinkley operation almost died from an infected bladder and an open wound that oozed pus from his scrotum. During an operation, Brinkley had punctured the patient's bladder and had tried plugging it up with just a rock, a literal rock.

• 1:42:48Speaker 05

  Let's do it. Yeah, it was so much harder to get stoned back then.

• 1:42:52Marcus Parks?

  And surprisingly, several people reported that during these operations, they could smell whiskey on Brinkley's breath. It's called surgeon coffee.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Surgeon juice.

• 1:43:04Marcus Parks?

  But despite Brinkley's cheery on-air persona, he was often unsympathetic to people who had complications. One poor man wrote to Brinkley to complain that he could barely walk after his operation, but the only response Brinkley sent back was, quote,

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  "Your condition is your own fault. Merry Christmas."

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  You suffered from jingle balls.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  That's a funny little joke we do around here at the ball clinic. Yeah, it's a funny little thing we do.

• 1:43:35Marcus Parks?

  And so, after spending years collecting evidence, Morris Fishbein teamed up with the Kansas City Star to print multiple exposes featuring testimonies from Brinkley's heretofore unheard-from patients, who were not only unsatisfied with Brinkley's work, but were, in some cases, permanently wrecked with no hope of repair. Now, the Kansas City Star went hard on the exposes by publishing not only the testimonies of survivors, but the death certificates of 42 patients who had died after being treated by John Brinkley. You know, all doctors have a certain fatality rate, especially back then, but most of these patients weren't

• 1:44:16Marcus Parks?

  even sick before seeing Brinkley. But surprisingly, only six people had died after the goat gland surgery specifically.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  I bet you, you know why? It's because balls, it's like wide prostate cancer and testicular cancer are some of the more like curable cancers, because they're at the end of the track.

• 1:44:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  They're at the outside of your body, so it's easier to get it, it's easier for it to not jump into the rest of your body.

• 1:44:39Marcus Parks?

  Just take them out.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  If I was him, I'd just be like, "All patients die eventually."

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  You know what? He's got a point. Life is an endless march to the grave.

• 1:44:53Marcus Parks?

  Now, I should send him $2.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:44:58Marcus Parks?

  Amongst other causes of death, these poor souls in Dr. Brinkley's care died from nephritis, which is inflammation of the kidneys, peritonitis, which is an infection in the lining of the abdomen, Minnie died from gangrene, and sepsis, can you say sepsis to the, sepsis?

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Sepsis.

• 1:45:16Marcus Parks?

  Thank you. Brinkley, however, seemed unfazed by the expose. In response to the many, many allegations against him, he took out a two-page ad for his hospital in a competing Kansas City paper, the Kansas City Journal Post, and this was in addition to a $600,000 libel suit he filed against Morris Fishbein. Brinkley then denounced the AMA over the airwaves, calling it the Amateur Meat Cutters Association. Morris Fishbein was called Little Old Fishy.

• 1:45:47Speaker 05

  Oh, hey, be kind there, buddy.

• 1:45:49Marcus Parks?

  Brinkley was also a rabid anti-Semite. He soon went after Fishbein's Jewish heritage on radio broadcasts as well, routinely referring to Morris Fishbein as, quote, "The poor Jew boy."

• 1:46:01Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm doing very well financially.

• 1:46:06Marcus Parks?

  But just because I don't have a giant mansion out in the hills, doesn't mean I'm not doing well, I'm doing very well.

• 1:46:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you listen to my mother, I'm some kind of poor Jew boy, but if anybody else, they tell ya, I'm doing very well.

• 1:46:20Marcus Parks?

  Now, the libel suit did absolutely nothing to deter Morris Fishbein. He actually doubled his efforts by teaming up with the head of the AMA's Bureau of Investigation. This was another man with an incredible name, called Arthur Cramp.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Today, we're gonna stand up and we're gonna fuck you ass, son of a, how fucking I stretch my legs. Someone get this man a banana.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  I said no bananas.

• 1:46:49Marcus Parks?

  Well, together, Arthur Cramp and Morris Fishbein released several volumes of a journal called Nostrums and Quackery and Pseudo-Medicine, in which they collected and published information on some 200,000 quacks and charlatans over the course of the series.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Cramp and Fishbein need to be selling ointments. I've never seen two people selling ointments, names like that in fucking ever, dude. Fishbein and Cramp, Cramp and Fishbein?

• 1:47:15Marcus Parks?

  Oh, Cramp and Fishbein's liniment?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  That is, I'm buying it.

• 1:47:19Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. But they did, however, believe that Dr. Brinkley was the most dangerous quack in all of America, because he was damn good at radio, and, in their words, "He was the most daring." And so, because of their sustained efforts, the sustained efforts of Cramp and Fishbein, Brinkley's medical license was finally revoked by the Kansas State Medical Board. Shortly after losing his medical license, the FCC also chose to not renew Brinkley's broadcasting license because of the many controversies around his medical question box segment. Besides just the danger he posed to the public, citizens had also been disturbed by Brinkley's continued wurs of the word "goddamn" during broadcasts.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's his filthy mouth, it's my big problem with me.

• 1:48:05Marcus Parks?

  But more than anything, they had taken issue with how frequently he used words like "erection" and "climax," which were quite scandalous to hear on the radio in 1930.

• 1:48:17Speaker 05

  But not erected, you know? I feel like erection and climax are better than goddamn. Yeah, goddamn, these goddamn American.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Medical Association.

• 1:48:27Speaker 05

  Goddamn poor Jews.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Not on the list.

• 1:48:32Speaker 05

  You're right.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  Totally fine with it. That's fine. That's fine. Oh, that's fine, is it?

• 1:48:38Speaker 05

  Kind of agree with the fishbone stuff. Yeah, that's what they're all saying. I also, I'm kind of interested that I, I can't believe that climax is the term.

• 1:48:47Marcus Parks?

  Uh, that he would use?

• 1:48:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I thought that, you know, like, they would have like, uh, the weird other term, like, the denomale, or like, the grand ending, or, or the seed, the seed eruption.

• 1:49:00Marcus Parks?

  I mean, from what I can tell from reading some of his transcripts, he would do that sort of, um, like homespun thing, like, you know, there's just no other way to say it, a man's erection. We're just gonna say it, we're just gonna say erection.

• 1:49:12Speaker 05

  Erection.

• 1:49:13Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:49:14Marcus Parks?

  Now, you'd think that all of this would be the end of John Brinkley. But as the classic quote from H.L. Mencken goes, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard." See, while government agencies were trying to do everything they could to protect the public from John Brinkley, the public decided that they didn't want to be protected. They wanted Dr. Brinkley. So Brinkley's career not only continued after the expose, and after he lost his medical license in Kansas, and after he lost his broadcasting license from the FCC, his medical career grew. He had not even yet reached the height of his success.

• 1:49:56Marcus Parks?

  So after Brinkley's radio station was shut down by the FCC in Kansas, Brinkley did what a lot of charlatans did back in those days to circumvent government regulations. He established a base of operations down in Del Rio, Texas, and opened a new radio station right across the border in Mexico, where the FCC couldn't say shit.

• 1:50:17Speaker 05

  He took the show down to La Baja.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  That's amazing, he pulled the Jesse Ventura.

• 1:50:22Marcus Parks?

  Hey, I mean, this was, uh,

• 1:50:23Speaker 05

  WWW.

• 1:50:25Marcus Parks?

  This was very common. They even had a name for these stations. They were called border blasters. Because they would build right across the border, and they would be extremely high-powered, so they could reach as far as they could. And Brinkley had so much money that he was able to build a transmitter capable of broadcasting with not 5,000 watts, but 50,000 watts, which is fucking ridiculous for an AM radio station. Brinkley's border blaster was therefore the strongest, furthest-reaching radio station on the entire continent. AM stations, if the transmitter's too strong, they become public nuisances. Ranchers could hear his station broadcasting from their barbed-wire fences.

• 1:51:07Marcus Parks?

  Children were said to have picked up John Brinkley's broadcasts in their braces.

• 1:51:11Speaker 05

  Now, I don't understand this. Like, what does that mean, that sound would come from the metal?

• 1:51:16Marcus Parks?

  Yes.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Yes, he would collect in it like it was receptors, because it would be like the metal that's in a radio.

• 1:51:21Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, it would vibrate, and it would actually brog- I've heard it myself.

• 1:51:24Speaker 05

  That's fucking crazy.

• 1:51:26Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that's how strong they were.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  And first of all, I'd like to give a big old grand benvenuto and, uh, welcome and hola and chao to my brand-new amigos and amigos over here in the lovely lando de Mexico. Timmy, your Don Imus impression is getting great.

• 1:51:48Marcus Parks?

  Well, then, to I suppose, fill up his days and perhaps get himself into a position where he could change laws that he didn't like, Brinkley decided to run for governor of Kansas in 1930, same year that the exposes came out. But despite these exposes from the Kansas City Star, Brinkley still came in a close third as a write-in candidate. But that's the thing, it's like, a close third, that doesn't sound impressive, he actually kind of won. See, three days before the election, Kansas changed the write-in laws to specify that only ballots listing the candidate's full Christian name would be counted in favor of the candidate.

• 1:52:30Marcus Parks?

  So if the voter didn't write John R. Brinkley or J.R. Brinkley on the ballot, the vote didn't count. And Brinkley had to tell all of his supporters about this like, three days before. But, as a result, between 30,000 and 50,000 ballots for Brinkley were tossed out. But because Brinkley was such a close third, had those ballots been counted, he would have been the next governor of Kansas. And let me remind you, the Kansas City Star exposes were not the distant past. They had been printed earlier that year. So let me reiterate, Americans have always been like this.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  We love our villains. We love villains, we love charlatans. I do believe that there are people in the American makeup to look at guys like this that made money doing nothing, and view it as aspirational.

• 1:53:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, people who hate the government, want to go, people want to vote for people who go against the government.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:53:27Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, and then they find out, um, why we need a government.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:31Marcus Parks?

  Now, because Brinkley technically won, he was encouraged. He ran for governor two years later as an independent. But there was a specter from his past waiting to once again reappear and fuck up his life. Sally Wyke, the ex-wife who'd gotten him arrested in Greenville, South Carolina, 20 years earlier out of pure spite, suddenly reappeared during his second governor campaign to tell anyone who would listen that Brinkley was a deadbeat dad who'd abandoned her and her three daughters to poverty. But Sally Wyke was just another opportunist. Brinkley just had to pay her off, and then she completely recanted and said like, nah, actually, he's fine. But that was just one of Brinkley's problems in this election.

• 1:54:11Marcus Parks?

  Former patients and family members of deceased patients were starting to speak out against Brinkley as well. And while some of those patients accepted bribes in exchange for their silence, others didn't. To take care of those who wouldn't take the money, Brinkley got some hired goons from the infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency. And those hired goons silenced Brinkley's detractors using their usual tactics of intimidation and blackmail.

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  Man, the Pinkertons show up in these stories almost every fucking time.

• 1:54:44Marcus Parks?

  Yep.

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  It's wild.

• 1:54:45Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, we're, we're working on a Pinkerton series right now. Probably based, probably centered around the Battle of Blair Mountain. But yeah, the Pinkertons are one of the most, uh, evil organizations to ever exist in American history.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Don't they still exist?

• 1:54:58Marcus Parks?

  Yep.

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:58Marcus Parks?

  They sure do. But even though Brinkley was on the ballot for this second election, he still came in a close third. Two years later, he ran for governor again, but this time lost in a landslide. So, finally taking the hint, Brinkley liquidated everything he owned in Milford and moved most of his operations down to the border town of Del Rio. Thirty families who worked for him in Milford, Kansas, moved with him down to Texas, which caused a total economic collapse in the small town of Milford. Brinkley's name was removed from every building, and the high school mascot was changed from the goat to the panther, while the people of Milford did everything they could to just forget John Brinkley ever existed.

• 1:55:41Marcus Parks?

  I mean, remember one time they all had to hide in their homes because he was drunk waving a gun around?

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  He's a fun guy.

• 1:55:48Marcus Parks?

  But now that Brinkley was down in Del Rio full-time, he could devote himself completely to his border blaster station in Mexico, which was even more fraudulent than the one that came before, because it was now entirely outside of the FCC's regulations. Brinkley began running ads for fake gold mine stocks, bogus life insurance, healing crystals, and even autographed pictures of none other than Jesus Christ himself.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  You can tell, you signed it right here, J.C. You know that those letters existed in Hebrew.

• 1:56:23Speaker 05

  You know those like, fake autograph places in Vegas, that like, try to get people who just want a bunch of money? I remember seeing an autograph they were selling in there once for Leonardo da Vinci.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah! I know exactly what you're talking about! You're like, you're, this is fucking stupid.

• 1:56:40Marcus Parks?

  Well, Brinkley also continued advertising patent medicines, but these new products were far more harmful than anything he'd sold before. He sold color-back hair dye, which caused lead poisoning. There was lash lure, which caused blindness. There was rataphor, which of course caused radium poisoning.

• 1:57:00Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 1:57:01Marcus Parks?

  Perhaps the worst was krimloo, which was a hair-removal cream marketed to ladies who wanted to keep a clean upper lip. That was basically rat poison, and it caused paralysis.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Take a look at that upper lip. You can't even see it, it's now just teeth.

• 1:57:18Speaker 05

  It seems like it was just pure maliciousness.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 05

  He could have created something that worked, or it did nothing.

• 1:57:25Marcus Parks?

  Well, he,

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, or it did nothing.

• 1:57:27Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, he didn't have to sell any of the, like, he had more money than he could spend in 100 lifetimes, uh, reasonably at least. Uh, but still, he, he just couldn't help himself. He wa- he liked it. He liked scamming people. And he's not making this stuff. This is just the shit that was around, you know, like,

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  He's just packaging it, making money off the top.

• 1:57:46Speaker 05

  MS-13's doing it.

• 1:57:48Marcus Parks?

  Yeah. So once Brinkley established Del Rio as a permanent residence, he opened another hospital along the Texas-Mexico border, where he expanded his expertise on the human body to include both the lemonade and the fudge, if you know what I mean.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I do. One corner is one, and around the other is the other.

• 1:58:08Marcus Parks?

  But this new hospital treatment offered, in Brinkley's words, treatment for, quote,

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Your two sewers, your waterworks, and your garbage.

• 1:58:18Marcus Parks?

  Okay, sir. Use them out. Well, the remedies for your garbage, as it were, included surgeries for fistulas, hemorrhoids, colitis, and any and all diseases of the male and female rectum.

• 1:58:29Marcus Parks?

  But since Brinkley was expanding, he backed off on the goat gland procedure in the 1930s and only performed it by special request. Instead, he claimed he had a new prostate surgery that worked even better, even though the surgery was basically just a partial vasectomy.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  It's like we creep in Radiohead.

• 1:58:47Speaker 05

  You're gonna do, he never just chose feet or something else, it's always the dick or the fucking asshole.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Because it moves units.

• 1:58:54Marcus Parks?

  It's his niche, man, it's his area. But Brinkley claimed that this new surgery could smooth wrinkles on a man's face.

• 1:59:01Speaker 01

  We started the balls. We pull them tight. Pulls all the skin tight.

• 1:59:06Marcus Parks?

  It can turn his complexion back to the ruddy glow of health, could even change the color of a patient's hair. On his broadcasts, Brinkley would challenge his male listeners. He would say, this is an example of one of his speeches.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  You men, why are you holding back? You know your prostate's infected and diseased. Well, why do you hold back? Why do you twist and squirm around the old cocklebur when I'm offering you these low rates, this easy work, this lifetime of service plan? Come at once to the Brinkley Hospital before it is everlastingly too late. Delay is oh, so dangerous.

• 1:59:47Marcus Parks?

  That's, he began referring to the prostate as that old cocklebur.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  That old cocklebur.

• 1:59:54Marcus Parks?

  Now, as I said, the American people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard. As such, so many people traveled to Del Rio for Brinkley's new surgery, and he was making the modern equivalent of half a million dollars per month.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:00:10Marcus Parks?

  And so, between 1933 and 1938, after he was exposed as a dangerous and deadly fraud multiple times over, John Brinkley earned the modern equivalent of a quarter of a billion dollars.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  That's good business.

• 2:00:27Marcus Parks?

  And let me remind you, this most profitable period was during the Great Depression, which did not touch John Brinkley in any meaningful way whatsoever.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Marcus Parks?

  That's how good he was. He got people during the Great Depression to give him money.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, if your dick doesn't work in the depression, you gotta be double desperate to get that dick working. Yeah. Cause that's the only free thing that's out there. Yeah. Is masturbating.

• 2:00:52Speaker 05

  You'd figure people wouldn't care.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  See, I would.

• 2:00:55Speaker 05

  I don't. I don't.

• 2:00:58Marcus Parks?

  Now, since Brinkley was already into eugenics, and because his main nemesis had been a Jewish fella named Morris Fischbein, Brinkley spent the 1930s enamored with a little fella out of Germany, making a whole lot of noise, making a whole lot of Germans happy, a man named Adolf Hitler.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that old chestnut. I love him. I was wondering if he was gonna get involved. Uh, ball surgeries? I would like one as well, please. I am missing one because he had the goat bite it off. Yeah. That's what I heard.

• 2:01:30Marcus Parks?

  Well, Brinkley was such a Hitler fan.

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32Marcus Parks?

  That when he built a massive mansion in Del Rio, Texas, which he painted pink for some reason, he had little swastikas and little iron crosses emblazoned on the swimming pool diving boards, which is really a bizarre way to pay tribute to the Fuhrer.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  I want him to think of the Fuhrer when I'm relaxing. I wanna think of the Nazi Party and the Nazi death machine while I'm laying in the sun.

• 2:01:57Speaker 05

  You know, with the swastika diving board, four people could dive at once.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  It's just difficult, you gotta put it in the center of the pool.

• 2:02:04Marcus Parks?

  Well, Brinkley soon joined the American fascist movement and became an enthusiastic and supportive member of the Nazi Party. He gave American Nazis airtime on his radio, on his Border Blaster station, which again was the most powerful radio station in America. And in 1936, during that presidential election, Brinkley supported a bizarre little fascist named William Dudley Pelley. Pelley's platform called for the re-enslavement of black Americans, the segregation and sterilization of Jewish citizens, and the overthrowing of the US government to form a white Christian state controlled by corporations.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  I would like to maybe say one little criticism of Mr. Pelley. I just wanna say, I also don't like his haircut. It's not appropriate. It's not appropriate for the presidency.

• 2:02:54Marcus Parks?

  And yeah, and thank God we don't have anybody there trying to overthrow the US government to replace it with a white Christian state controlled by corporations. Thank Christ, we don't have to worry about that anymore.

• 2:03:02Speaker 05

  I'm honestly surprised he lost.

• 2:03:05Marcus Parks?

  Well, Pelley was also a dedicated occultist who published a newsletter called Valor, which was a mishmash of articles on Christianity, theosophy, UFO sightings. He was actually a very early UFO proponent, and he also talked a lot about an esoteric philosophy of his own creation that he called Soulcraft.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:03:24Marcus Parks?

  Pelley, however, did not do well in the election, and he was eventually charged with sedition in 1942 because, you know, by that point, we were at war with the Nazis.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we hated it.

• 2:03:34Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, and he was jailed for eight years.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Wow, that could get you in trouble then, huh?

• 2:03:39Marcus Parks?

  Uh, used to. But concerning Brinkley's downfall, the bad times for Brinkley began when he was chased out of Del Rio by a rival quack surgeon, a young buck.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  This is how you go, this is how it goes down.

• 2:03:52Speaker 05

  This is fucking lions, man.

• 2:03:54Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, man, yeah, fucking James Middlebrook swooped into town and offered the same fraudulent sexual rejuvenation surgeries as Brinkley, but he offered it for a fifth of the price.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  I'll also reverse the direction of your vagina. I could take a vagina and switch it from north to south to south to north.

• 2:04:16Marcus Parks?

  Now, one might think it'd be useless to have the clitoris down low, but you'd be surprised at what advantages it might have.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  The clitoris is a distraction to making a child. Have you ever wanted to enjoy shitting a little more?

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  The poo poo rubs on the, on the, the nanu bump. That's what we call it here in the science brigade over here.

• 2:04:39Marcus Parks?

  Not a lot, but it's a little.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Little bit.

• 2:04:42Marcus Parks?

  Well, Middlebrook, he also knew who he was dealing with. I mean, he, he's a man after Brinkley's own image. So, Middlebrook showed up with his own hired goons. He engaged Brinkley in full gang warfare on the streets of Del Rio. Middlebrook's goons would hang around Brinkley's hospital, and they would encourage patients to go to Middlebrook's hospital and say, why don't you go over to Middlebrook's hospital? Says, it's a fifth of the price, why are you going to Brinkley? I don't think you should go to Brinkley.

• 2:05:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot of the patients that go there to get their fucking legs broke.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Oh, well, yeah, I should go. I should go to Middlebrook then.

• 2:05:18Marcus Parks?

  But Brinkley then hired goons of his own to chase off Middlebrook's goons, but then after several months of street fights in which the locals actually began taking sides and joining in, Brinkley gave up on Del Rio, gave up on radio, and left town with his tail between his legs.

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  I just gotta say, it's just, the worst part of this is admitting he's a better doctor than I.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  He beat me.

• 2:05:45Marcus Parks?

  Brinkley's misfortunes, however, were only starting. Morris Fischbein was not at all satisfied that Brinkley was defeated, so he released yet another article outlining all of Brinkley's crimes and frauds.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  I will do what I do best, a long and pointed list of problems.

• 2:06:05Marcus Parks?

  In two pots.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  That's it. Read the second article, it came out a month later. To get the complete picture, a stern letter is what defeats fascism.

• 2:06:18Marcus Parks?

  That's the thing. Brinkley could have ignored the paper. Very few people read it, but Brinkley made a massive miscalculation.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Hey, piece of shit, I, I work hard on this paper.

• 2:06:29Marcus Parks?

  I know you do, I know you do.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  I worked hard on that article. It took me several days to list all the crimes.

• 2:06:34Marcus Parks?

  But when Brinkley sued Fischbein for libel for this article, he felt the full force of what we now know as the Streisand Effect. Brinkley's lawsuit not only drew the public's attention to this formerly obscure article, but it also forced Brinkley into court, where he was also forced to defend his own fraudulent practices. And guess what? He couldn't. He couldn't defend anything. He admitted that the goat glands sometimes just rotted away inside a human's body. He admitted that the goat gland surgery had always been a fraud, and it could not do by itself what it promised to do.

• 2:07:15Marcus Parks?

  There were dozens upon dozens of patients who came through and gave testimonies. Fischbein, of course, testified, he had his moment in the sun. Jury deliberated for just four hours before finding in Morris Fischbein's favor.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  No one's ever chosen me.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  That's all, this is the, where are you going? No, I did this, where are you going?

• 2:07:40Marcus Parks?

  Well, effectively, Brinkley was legally declared to be a quack and a charlatan, which opened up a flood of malpractice, fraud, and wrongful death lawsuits. Hundreds of cases were filed against Brinkley, but Brinkley's actions actually had far-reaching consequences, consequences that we feel today. Morris Fischbein's two-decade-long pursuit of Brinkley resulted in not only new regulations in American medicine that still exist today, but this is why we have nationwide medical licensing standards for doctors. They did not exist prior to this, it was state by state. This is why it's nationwide.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  I love you, Mr. Fischbein. I will say, I do appreciate, all of you appreciating me in the future. I would have liked just a little bit of money. Just any of that, if I could, if any money could be sent to Morris, that would help Morris do one.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Things like eat. Pay his rent. I don't have many cars. Where are you all going?

• 2:08:47Marcus Parks?

  So in the end, John Brinkley did change the way medicine was practiced in the United States, but it was changed specifically to try and protect Americans from doctors like John Brinkley. Now, despite Brinkley's massive earnings, his entire empire collapsed within just a few years as a result of both the hundreds of lawsuits and the ridiculous amount of spending that he had done when he was still making money. By the early 1940s, Brinkley had declared bankruptcy. He was even set to go on trial for mail fraud in April of 1942. That's how fucking low he'd the post office was coming after him. But in August of 1941, Brinkley went to a hospital in San Antonio after he began feeling poorly. A blood clot had lodged

• 2:09:32Marcus Parks?

  itself in his leg, so the doctors were forced to amputate Brinkley's leg then in there.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  Before we do that, have you thought about putting some balls in?

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Just for once, just for old times sake.

• 2:09:46Marcus Parks?

  We've made it this whole time without making a single, I want to dip my balls in it joke. Well, Brinkley rapidly lost weight after that and suffered a heart attack at the end of 1941. After lingering on for a few more months, Brinkley died in May of 1942, broke and disgraced. But to perhaps answer the question as to how John Brinkley was able to swindle so much money out of so many Americans for such a long period of time, I think one quote from one former patient who gave testimony to Morris Fishbein says it all. About Brinkley, the former patient said, quote,

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  I knowed he was bilking me, but I liked him anyways. That's actually very sad.

• 2:10:36Speaker 05

  I just think that should be underneath the eagle on the dollar.

• 2:10:42Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, actually, when we re-release like a Sacagawea dollar, it should be on the other side.

• 2:10:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:47Marcus Parks?

  And the picture of John Brinkley. Yeah. And that's the story of John Brinkley.

• 2:10:50Speaker 05

  That's great, dude. I'm sad we hadn't done this earlier, man. I fucking love this story. I love flim flam men.

• 2:10:55Marcus Parks?

  I love him so much.

• 2:10:56Speaker 05

  I love chicanery. I love fake medicine. It's my favorite thing in the world. I want to do it.

• 2:11:00Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 05

  I'm jealous of John Brinkley.

• 2:11:02Marcus Parks?

  Nah, but you can't do it.

• 2:11:04Speaker 05

  No, I can.

• 2:11:05Marcus Parks?

  You can't.

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, you just put goat balls in people.

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  I'll take some.

• 2:11:10Marcus Parks?

  Okay.

• 2:11:10Speaker 05

  First customer.

• 2:11:11Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, first customer. All right. All right.

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  I knewed. I knowed he was bilking me.

• 2:11:16Speaker 05

  I want them.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  Uh, well, guys, that was great. Good work, Marcus. Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left. Good work, Joel as well, a researcher.

• 2:11:24Marcus Parks?

  Rachel also worked on this one.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  Rachel was great. I can't wait till she comes back. She is out there raising a child. Raising a child. So welcome to our Patreon. Go listen to us ad free or see the movie stories is over on Patreon. Also see last stream in the left live every Tuesday, 5pm PSD. Go look at LP on the left at all the socials for whatever the fuck. Go to lastpodcastinthe left.com for our live shows. Right now Eddie and I are going on the road a couple more times this year.

• 2:11:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're gonna be Portland, Maine is sold out on November 14th and November 15th. Check us out at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington, Vermont. After that, Henry and I are gonna be out in Pasadena at the Ice House doing Ed Larson and Friends. Henry's gonna be hosting. It's me and Henry and Billy Wayne Davis, Carmen Legala, and the wonderful Pat Parker. After that, Henry and I are gonna be in Iowa City on December 11th at the Engler Civic Civic Center. And on December 12th, we're gonna be the Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri. Come check us out there. And the very following night, I'm gonna go do some stand up in St. Louis at Helium Comedy Club. Check that out. I also got dates next year in Nashville, Rochester, Albany, Fort Lauderdale, et cetera. Go to

• 2:12:38Speaker 05

  eddytunes.com to get your bullshit.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  Fuck yeah, dude. Hail Satan.

• 2:12:44Marcus Parks?

  Hail game.

• 2:12:45Speaker 05

  I'm gonna hail Bonnie Raitt. I saw her last night and it was fucking lovely.

• 2:12:49Marcus Parks?

  Oh, it sounds nice.

• 2:12:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, it was really, it was, it was truly wonderful. She did a Nirvana cover.

• 2:12:55Marcus Parks?

  Which song?

• 2:12:55Speaker 05

  Rate Me.

• 2:12:57Marcus Parks?

  Wow.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  I know she fucking.

• 2:12:59Speaker 05

  Rate Me.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  He's doing a joke. He's doing a fucking ass joke.

• 2:13:02Marcus Parks?

  Rate, rate me.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Fucking assholes. He's been thinking about this whole time. He hasn't heard a word.

• 2:13:07Marcus Parks?

  He really hasn't.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  All he's thinking about is that, that, that joke, Eddie.

• 2:13:10Speaker 05

  I was, I mean, it was, I would love talking about Gary Ridgeway again.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  Let's get out of here.

• 2:13:19Marcus Parks?

  I'm gonna go home.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  Get me a fucking suck on some fish blood or something.

• 2:13:24Speaker 05

  Rate Me.

• 2:13:31Speaker 06

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