Just looking at the title alone — Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of FlimFlam — takes the sting (pun unintended) out of the story of a quintessential slice of scalawag Americana, as if the peril was strictly from a time and place long ago and far away. But the connotations conjured by the charlatans, hard sell hucksters, and flimflam men from the antiquated era of snake oil salesmen, medicine shows, and fly-by-night shysters have only given way to today’s crass commercialization, large scale swindles and cons, hit-the-air-waves doubletalk and deceptions in which, to quote Tom Waits, the “large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
As someone who had his hand in many of the duplicitous activities of his times — and who had the innovative foresight to pioneer some future frauds — Dr. John R. Brinkley was an overachiever, a marketing genius, a highly successful — yet uncredentialed — quack, and, not incidentally, a serial killer. But first things first, as Pope Brock chronicles in this dark amusement how Brinkley, after touring as a medicine man hawking "miracle" tonics, became famous for transplanting goat testicles into impotent men. In 1917 he and his wife Minnie settled in Milford, Kansas — “as close as you could get to the to the navel of the United States, and about as interesting to contemplate” — and opened his first clinic. Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923, where in between hawking his “glandular rejuvenation” he featured astrological readings and country songs.
There wasn’t a lot of rejuvenation and high-spiritedness going on for those hard luck true believers who were victimized by the high-priced and slipshod surgical techniques, along with a line of Brinkley-endorsed and absurdly marked-up prescription drugs (the most prescribed was merely colored water). Moreover, there were those patients left with festering wounds and blood poisoning, for which Brinkley had to perform hasty and often inadequate post-op cover-ups and carry out PR damage control, and those unfortunates who “entered [Brinkley’s] clinic vertical and departed horizontal." But why focus on these latter cases, those patients who didn’t have the presence of a psychosomatic mind to fool themselves into thinking themselves virile and healthy and alive?
Geez, just turn your head and cough, will ya? More clinics were built in Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas, and significant inroads were paved in politics — the doctor ran for governor of Kansas twice — while radio broadcasting, country music, and high society was calling. Brinkley bought ever more expensive mansions, cars, and yachts. Matching automobiles and estates, yet: when he had his mansion in Del Rio, Texas, painted, he had his Cadillacs painted the same color.
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