| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley. By R. Alton Lee. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. xviii, 283 pp. $29.95,ISBN 0-8131-2232-5.)

In his readable account of The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley, R. Alton Lee makes the case that the subject of his biography was relentlessly hounded by the American Medical Association. But was that a bad thing? The illegitimate child of a North Carolina physician, Brinkley parlayed a few courses from an eclectic medical college and several fraudulent degrees into the basis of a lucrative rural practice. Known as the "goat gland doctor" of Milford, Kansas, he began in 1917 to con aging male patients into believing in the possibility of sexual rejuvenation. Playing on the public's confused understanding of the hormone system, his operation consisted of transplanting into his impotent customers the gonads of Toggenburg goats. But salesmanship rather than surgery was his forte. To broadcast his purported cures he established KFKB—one of Kansas's first radio stations—pioneering a mix of live country music, fundamentalist preaching, and mercenary medical advice.

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