Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam [Hardcover]

Charlatan is a thoroughly enjoyable (and pertinent even today!) tale of medical quackery a man who spent years battling against the country's leading quack. The self-style "Doctor" Brinkley had no formal medical training and purchased his degrees. He started selling patent medicine for sexual problems (and other ailments) but soon found his niche. About 1919 he began transplanting goat testicles in men: $750 a pop. That's $750 back then, and no credit given. But you did get to visit the goat pen behind the clinic in Kansas to pick out a young billygoat of your choice.

By today's standards, the operations were eye-popping in terms of the lack of attention to asepsis/antisepsis. Gangrene and lockjaw were among the perils one too often faced. Brinkley got very rich, and very famous: he twice ran for governor of Kansas and was narrowly defeated both times. When the Kansas Medical Board came down hard on him (at last), Brinkley moved to Del Rio, Texas, and set up the most powerful radio station in the world just across the border. This staion was used to broadcast the program Medical Question Box which would answer questions for a fee and which promoted quack medicine available through mail order. Pulling in a million dollars a year (in 1930s dollars, not 2008 dollars) was no mean feat.

Nemesis, in the form of Dr Morris Fishbein, finally proved to be Brinkley's undoing. Fishbein spent his life fighting and exposing medical quackery, and regularly wrote articles for the JAMA. It took Fishbein 10 years to bring down Brinkley: the climax of the book is a magnificently described court case where Brinkley was a disaster on the stand. The author notes that Fishbein sometimes was overzealous in his pursuit of what he considered quackery--occasionally going after what are respectable areas of medicine nowadays. But even so, this is not a tale about an Inspector Javert pursuing Jean Valjean. Justice does triumph in the end, more or less.

This is a wonderfully written book about quackery, gullibility, money, politics, and the appetite of the public for medical cures. We can look back at the 1920's and 30's with relief that we're better off because of the diligence of the Fishbeins. But at the same time "alternative" medical treatments abound nowadays. You can go into almost any large drugstore chain and buy water labelled as medicine for earaches and the like (which is probably harmless but not helpful) and herbal products which can kill you. Quackery lives on. Ou sont les Fishbeins d'antan? to mangle a famous line. Brock's book reads like a good mystery, with well-drawn characters, a great storyline, a climactic trial, and some lessons for today. You'll enjoy this.

I couldn't put this book down, and couldn't stop from telling other people about it.

I don't want to give away too many details, but it was amazing, fun, and yet sad, to learn that an American in the 20th century could earn millions, win popular acclaim, hobnob with the rich and famous, and nearly win election as a governor - all because people believed that, er, goat glands could bring them renewed life and, er, virility.

There are many other odd twists to the story, from popular music to media history to the rise of the American Medical Association.

It's an oddball slice of history told with the wry wit the story deserves.

This book will rejuvenate your reading.

Everybody knows Viagra nowadays, and what it treats. Eighty years ago, everyone knew of the "goat gland" treatment, which not only treated what Viagra treats, but also brought a general rejuvenation to men, eliminated flab, advanced previously receding hairlines, and provided other miraculous cures. Provided cures, that is, to the gullible. The goat gland treatment never worked, despite its fame, and unlike the talismans that men have used for millennia to restore vigor, it had serious, sometimes lethal side effects. That little drawback did not impair the career of Doctor (perhaps that should be "Doctor") John R. Brinkley, one of the most famous of names in America in the 1930s. His astonishing rise and fall story is told with wry good humor in _Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam_ (Crown Publishers) by Pope Brock. Brinkley is gone, and Brock does not harp on lessons we might learn from his enterprise, but it is clear that although we don't do goat glands anymore, the golden age for medical hucksterism has never entered its twilight.

Brinkley was a farm boy who fiddled with "electric medicine" and injecting colored water into the buttocks of patients, which got him jailed in South Carolina in 1913 for practicing without a license. Once sprung, he headed to Chicago, and in 1915 he paid $150 for a degree from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, and he was in business. He set up a clinic in Milford, Kansas, and began implanting goat testicles into men who had lost their pep. He became a pioneer in radio advertising, and also in broadcasting country music. He became a right-wing demagogue on the radio, ranting against communism and at least initially giving tacit approval to Nazism, and giving Sunday sermons comparing the torments that Jesus suffered from the Philistines to those he himself suffered from the American Medical Association. He drove himself into a collision with the AMA when he started advertising. His nemesis at the AMA was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the editor of the _Journal of the AMA_, a platform from which he became a quack-buster, with special concentration on ending Brinkley's career. Fishbein was accused of merely upholding AMA's line of promoting the activities only of AMA-approved doctors and their AMA-approved techniques, but he genuinely cared about the people who had been hurt by Brinkley's surgeries or mail-order scams. It took a long time, more than two decades during which Fishbein tracked Brinkley's activities from Kansas to Texas to Arkansas.

As Brock describes him, Brinkley was a resourceful villain who until the end stayed one step ahead of his enemies and made millions, owning three yachts and countless cars. Brock gives evidence that Brinkley was not deluding himself, but knew he was making gain from defrauding his clients. His ability at self promotion and in fooling others is often funny, and often this is a hilarious book describing Brinkley's folly and that of his patients. Reading about the body count, however, or about the patients whose lives were ruined as the money rolled into Brinkley's accounts, is not funny. It may be that medical con artists nowadays aren't doing surgery, but television and internet advertisement is still touting pills and gadgets for "male enhancement", as well as weight reduction, breast augmentation, magnetic healing, and plenty else. Each cure claims scads of satisfied customers; one of the great lessons of Brock's entertaining book is that such attestations are completely meaningless. Another great lesson is that a sucker is born every minute, and so is a charlatan ready to take his money. It's not a new lesson, or a profound one, but it is revealed here in a duel of personalities that is compelling reading.