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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast, the show that presents the latest science based strategies to help us live happier, more joyful lives. In the next season of the Happiness Live, we'll explore how to make friends happier parenting strategies, and why drinking the world's hottest hot sauce can be fun. Oh my God. Listen to the Happiness lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? Lubin, my slipping slides. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. The show where every week I talk about a new terrible person and and try a new terrible introduction to try and get a reaction from my guests. Caitlin durante. How are you? How are you feeling about that one? Who's lubing up? You're slipping, slide. Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah, that was the intro. Yeah, well, I would. I liked it. To me, whoever's lubing up your slip and slide is a good person because you want your slip and slide. Nice and lubed. Oh yeah. Otherwise you'll get some real bad tears. Yeah, you you don't want those tears. Those slip and slide tears. So you're going to want that Lube and the person still want to know who is doing it? OK, so you're asking me who lubes my slip and slide? It's it's more like a like a question. I'm asking the universe. Aren't we all wondering on some level what's lubing our slip and slides? I want to tell you specifically who is lubing my slip and slide though. Just kidding. But it is Nicholas Holt, star of you know, some movies Mad Max Yup, Tolkin. Which I won't see actually I will. Anyway, that's Nicholas Holt is lubing all of our slipping slides. I think that's beyond a doubt. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. I'm not wrong. So, Caitlin, I've already introduced you by name, but you want to plug some plegables before we get into the episode today? I'd love to. I'm a comedian. I am the Co host of the Bechdel cast, which is another podcast right here on this darn network. And yeah, that's about it. Mm-hmm. And you were with me to talk about L Ron Hubbard last year? Yeah. It was a very good time talking about that. And now we're talking about a different but almost as ambitious grifter. Oh, I love the ambitious ones. Oh yeah, yeah. This guy, this guy's ************* ambition coming out the wazoo. All of his slipping slide shadow of a doubt. Yeah, if if ambition was a slip and slide, this guy would be lubing that slip and slide up like you would not believe. Right on, right on. Have you ever heard of John Brinkley? I have not. Have you ever heard of goat testicles? Just as a general thing, as a concept, I think that exists. I'm familiar with testicles and goats, and by proxy, I am familiar with the idea that goats would have testicles. Some of them now. And I understand you're going to have an exact number here, Caitlin. But would you venture to guess how many times you've heard the phrase goat testicles in your life up to this point? Not counting the two times I brought it up so far, I would say. Like, exactly that phrase. Or even just like a variation on like goat balls or any sort of. Yeah, direct reference to the to the testicular glands of a goat. Honestly, it's more than you think. Because if memory serves, goats have enormous testicles in relation to their bodies. So I feel like I've been to, like different petting zoos and people have like, commented on golf balls. So I feel like I've heard some variation on it maybe like 10 times throughout my life. Yeah. If that's the case, then I suspect for you and for most of our listeners, you are about to hear the phrase goat testicles more than you've ever heard it before in your entire life. Yeah, I'm. I'm very excited for this. John Romulus Brinkley came into this world on July 8th, in the year of our Lord 1885. His father, John Richard Brinkley, was a former medic in the Confederate Army. His mother, Sarah Burnett, was the niece of his dad's fourth wife, which is a chain of parentage that is best not contemplated too deeply. When John was five, his mother died. His father died when he was ten, and John was raised by his aunt Sally. He grew up in Jackson County, North Carolina, and seems to have been a rather ambitious child. He recalled later that he grew up. Dreaming of John Brinkley freeing the slaves? John Brinkley illuminating the world? John Brinkley facing an Assassin's bullet for the sake of his people. John Brinkley healing the sick. Can I see you right there? Yes, I'm sorry. His middle name is Romulus. Hmm. OK, that like the guy who killed his brother to make Rome, right? OK, for some reason I am like, oh, that's a Star Trek thing. I don't know enough about history, as you can tell. It's possible that they were just anticipating Star Trek's second or third best villain species, but but more likely it was a reference to Roman mythology. OK, I suppose that tracks, right? Yeah, I would. I would say that's more likely. His neighbors recall him being quote kind of a reckless like boy who was lively as a cricket because again, it was old timey days and people said **** like lively as a cricket. John's education was not up to snuff with his ambitions. By the age of 16, he'd been forced to leave school and get a job. He worked first as a mailman and then as a Telegraph operator. This job moved him to New York and then in New Jersey. It seemed like he was on the path for a decent middle class life. But then, at age 21, his aunt mom Sally died and he was forced to return to Jackson County to settle her affairs. Wait, is his aunt mom right? Yeah, I mean his aunt who raised him so OK. I'm. I'm his aunt mom. OK? I'm I was still a little confused on who the parents relatives are. Yeah and like which how much incest did happen, but it's confusing because his actual mom is the niece of his dad's wife, his dad's ex-wife, which I think makes his real mom his aunt mom too. So. Right. It's confusing, yes. Yeah, I'm not going to try to understand it. It's best not to try to parse that out too deeply. Yeah, well, he was back in Jackson County dealing with his aunt, his second aunt. Moms funeral. He met an Old Firm from school named Sally Wilke. Now that they were both mature adults, they started vibing off one another and then *******. And then one month after Aunt Sally's death, they got married. Wife Sally understood her husband's unrequited ambition to get into medicine. She told him that he didn't need to waste a bunch of time in medical school to become a doctor. This was true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. In the in the late 1890s, every state government saved three in the United States. Had repealed licensing laws for doctors. This was due to a populist movement that had swept the country against the idea of highfalutin educations and licenses, things that were seen as taking power from the common man, the way many people felt. Why shouldn't anyone be able to declare themselves a doctor for any reason? So that's that's sort of where things were in the late you're down with that. I'm down with that, too. Too much education out there. Let's scale it back. I'm I'm having a bunch of hats printed up right now that just say, make every American a doctor. Again, I think that'll that'll that'll deal with the problem of not enough good jobs and the student loan problem. It's really like a silver bullet for a couple of like our healthcare crisis, our debt crisis. Just make everybody a doctor, right. I I have so much student loan debt and I need so much medical attention and I don't know what to do about any of it. Well, and Caitlin, if you, I don't know how much student loan debt you have, but if you look at whatever that number is and then declare yourself a doctor, I'm going to bet it seems a lot more reasonable. That's true. Because if I have. The income of a doctor that, you know, $70,000 that I owe, that's pocket change for a doctor, probably. Yeah. A ****** doctor will make twice that in the year. This is this is a solid plan. Anyway, at around this point in the late 1890s, a teacher named Lemuel Shattuck was asked by the Massachusetts State legislature to carry out a survey of the state sanitary and medical facilities during this. His summary of the state of Massachusetts sanitary facilities is pretty accurate for sort of the state of of medical education in most of the US at the time. Quote anyone, male or female, learned or ignorant an honest manner in nave can assume the name of physician and practice upon anyone to cure or to kill as either may happen without accountability. It's a free country. Wait to cure or to kill? Yes, OK. So doctors, our response should be killing people as what they're saying. Doctors shouldn't be held to a high standard of not killing people. They should be able to do whatever they want because anyone should be a doctor. Yes, this is this is a real thing. That was a popular line of thought in America at the time. Now uh, John Brinkley yeah, pretty presently with his his new wife's advice became Doctor John Brinkley. Now this was not he was not a doctor, obviously any like licensed sense of the word, but he started traveling around and acting as what was known as a Quaker doctor. This was sort of a meme in America at this point, and I'm going to quote from the book charlatan by Pope Brock to explain what exactly was going on there. Quote. There was a set pattern to most Quaker doctor shows. First a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd. Warmed up, a short morality play followed, in which a noble head of house or regulated female died pathetically for lack of a miracle tonic identified by name. Finally, the physician himself, Brinkley shot on stage in a dinner plate, hat, cutaway coat, and pious pants that buttoned up the sides, being and throwing, singing and selling, waving a bottle of IRES cathartic pills, or maybe burdock blood bitters or aunt Fannies worm candy. One thing was for sure, whatever it was cured. Whatever you had. OK, wait, so you've got a warm up comic? You've got a feature and you've got a headliner. OK, the headliner is pretending to be a Quaker Doctor Who sells you nonsense medicine. And no matter what you have and no matter what's being hawked at the people, it works and it's a cure all. I mean, that's some, OK, I like that. I like that they pretty much, you know, just. I mean like this is a stand up show and it's gonna be hack. It's **** but. It's gonna people are going to love it sounds. And it's one of those things where, like back in back in those days, there wasn't TV, there wasn't even radio. There was ******* nothing to do for most people. So, like some fake doctor comes to town and puts on a show, maybe you buy his pills just because it's a distraction. I mean, he's he's selling merch. He's like, here's my show merch, here's the merch that you saw in the show. I mean, brilliant, good, good business plan. I love it. Solid branding. Yeah. Now this was obviously what we would call. Snake oil selling like you. Brinkley was a snake oil salesman. Have you ever wondered where the term snake oil comes from? Caitlin? Well, I haven't wondered that. Only because I'm not. I don't know if I've ever heard that before. If I have, like, a snake oil. Yeah, I don't know. I'm again, I don't know what Romulus is, and I don't know what snake oil is. I'm an idiot. Well, snake oil salesman is a common term for like, somebody who sells bogus. Like, people call Alex Jones a snake oil salesman because he sells his brain pills that are full of lead and stuff and the term. Came was coined in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was would have been when Brinkley was about 8 years old, and it came when a man wearing a cowboy costume got on stage and started strangling dozens of rattlesnakes to death and collecting the liquid that oozed out of them and selling it as a medicine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's literally where the term snake oil salesman comes from. I mean it's it's a very literal thing. Yeah. It's a man's strangle and snakes and getting the oil from the snakes and you know, in in in terms of our previous conversation about like these shows as entertainment, I would absolutely watch a man dressed as a ******* cowboy strangling snakes on stage and collect, whether or not he gets bit. Yeah, that's a show. Hell yeah. Yes. I kind of want to see Pat and Oswald do that, right. Why? Why isn't Kevin Hart my favorite comedian? JK the strangling snakes on stage. Well and and the great thing about most stand up comedians is that I wouldn't really care if they are the snakes one like either way, I'm going to get a good show. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, most Carrot Top, right? Most comedians probably should get bitten a little bit by. Snake. Couple, including me. I I need to you know, to get in check. I need to be bitten by a snake now. Caitlin, how many rattlesnakes do you think you could throttle if you if you if your career was on the line? Sophie is helping me out and saying four. I agree. That's a pretty good number of snakes. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, that's solid. I think Sophie has a lot of confidence in you. Thank you, Sophie. Or at least in your wrists, because if I, as I understand it, throttling. A rattlesnakes is is really wrist work more than anything. I have a very firm grip, I think, so I've I've noticed that that's a big thing about me. So for months, Sally and John Brinkley toured around, pretending to be a Quaker doctor and his wife selling nonsense medicine from a wagon. This worked for a while, but it eventually turned out that he and Sally didn't really like one another. They split up, not even bothering to divorce, and he headed off to pursue his medical ambitions in a more serious fashion. He enrolled at the Bennett Medical College of Chicago and then the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City. Oh, so he did decide to go to medical school. Well, he went to. He went to things. That work that had names that made them sound like medical schools, Caitlin. So these aren't accredited universities. These are in no way accredited. Yeah, and he didn't get full degrees from these non accredited universities anyway. He got a $25 loan from a loan shark that he never managed to repay and eventually he skipped town before finishing school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did get like a sort of undergraduate certification, I guess you'd call it. But again, it was unaccredited. Now, in a little bit of fairness to John Brinkley, at this point in time in history, medicine wasn't really a thing in the way it is today. So eclectic medicine is what we'd call like naturopathy now. It's using like herbs and and poultices and like waving sticks around and chanting and stuff like it it. It incurred all of that stuff. But this was 1908, so, like, the real doctors were pouring mercury in people and bleeding them to death. So there were actually situations in which a doctor with Brinkley's training would probably do better work on you than a real doctor because eclectic doctors didn't bleed people or feed the mercury. So it's there he's going to be beyond the point of being fair to at a certain point, but but up to this state, like, he's not necessarily a hack and a fraud. Edison is kind of nonsense. So him being a bad doctor actually makes him a better doctor than the real doctors like him being fake is that. Yeah, it's it's kind of that, like, if you're most of medicine was wrong at this point and and if you're wrong in a way to which you're not filling people's bodies with mercury and radium, then you're better for them. And like, there is some, there are some, like herbs and stuff that have actual medicinal potentials. Oh yeah, there is doctors, yeah. Yes, smoking that. It is still legal at this point, so yeah, so about 4% of doctors in this. Were eclectics. Of course, Brinkley was not one of them because he didn't graduate, but he did get an undergraduate degree that qualified him to practice medicine in a couple of States and, you know, while he was sort of bumming around Saint Louis drinking heavily, he met A1 armed man named James Crawford, and the two decided to open what was essentially a fake medical practice together. Crawford decided to go by the name. Doctor Burke and Brinkley went by the name Doctor Blakely. They called their operation the Greenville Electromedical doctors. Now, I just was trying to be fair to collecting medicine by talking about how it could be more reasonable than real medicine at that point in time in history. This is the point at which we get past them being reasonable, because 1908 is a period in which electricity is still new and exciting. And like every new technology, people assume that because it was shiny and different, it must confer incredible health benefits. So electric medicine was kind of a fad at this point. People would like fake. Doctors would sell electric ointments, electric toothbrushes, electric tinctures, electric food, electric corsets. Just by shocking someone with electricity, you could claim to be curing them. And most people would be surprised enough by this sensation that they just sort of go along with it. According to the book charlatan quote, Doctor Burke asked a few questions, made a few notes, and put out his palm for $25, a massive sum. From there, the client passed into the treatment room. Where? Doctor Blakely spent the morning injecting colored water into rear ends. If anyone asked, he said it was electric medicine from Germany's rear ends. Yeah, he's he's shooting dyed water into people's ***** and telling them that it's electric German medicine. OK, good. Is there actually? So is he also shooting electricity into people's ***** or no, he's just lying and claiming it's electric water medicine. I think they probably have some, like, electric gizmos near the water so that people believe that it's electric medicine, but it's it's just *** water. It's just colored *** water. Good. OK, yeah, so this this scam worked out for a while, but obviously shooting people's ***** full of colored water did not cure any known problem. Aside from the dubious problem of not having enough colored water in your ******* Brinkley and Crawford were eventually rightfully arrested for being frauds, and thus ended the saga of the Greenville Electromedical doctors. OK, I feel like. How do people get, what does that called a colonic to like, clean out your body? Yeah, yeah, I I wonder if maybe that like dyed water in their in people's ***** was doing something like that. I don't know if kolonics have any sort of medical benefits, but. I I just want to give him credit where credit is due, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think colonic would be a good example of like, modern day snake oil, because while there are, there are like certain situations in which, like, they can be helpful, they're kind of treated as cure alls for problems, I guess. I think it's the same thing as like electrocuting someone and it being a weird sensation and so you assume something medical has happened. I think a lot of people get stuff shot up their ***** and are like, well, that feels weird. It must be doing something. And yeah, yeah, the placebo effect kind of does the rest. Yeah, yeah. Boy, I was gonna make a pun like the Ath sibo effect, but it I don't know if it was gonna work, but I said it anyway. Yeah, that's one of those those jokes that would that works. Better written than spoken. Yes. Yeah, that's a good one. Well, we tried, we tried, we tried, we tried. Now, after getting out of jail, not a doctor, Brinkley met a girl named Minnie. She would prove to be the love of his life, mainly because she was exactly as down with his dreams of pretending to be a doctor as he was. For three years. The couple wandered around Kansas and Arkansas, with Brinkley working as a traveling doctor and many acting as his assistant. He eventually made enough money at this to buy a diploma, which made his claims of. To actually be a doctor more credible, on May 7th, 1915, the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City gave him the validation he'd always craved. This MD cost Brinkley $100 and gave him the right to practice medicine in eight states, so he immediately set up shop in Arkansas, working as a rural doctor. His big strategy was to rent a horse and charge out of town numerous times as if he was constantly on important emergency calls, saving lives. This particular grift did not work out, and he and many had to leave so. Where the the low point in our heroes journey right now but you know what can be the high point in in your heroes journey listener and and you as well Caitlin is the fine products and or services that advertise on our show which certainly aren't going to be snake oil. No we do not advertise for any companies that will shoot electric water up your *** and if we did I promise you listener it will be the best electric gas water that anybody. Serves. You know, we we vet all ask based businesses. Personally. I do. I personally do that. Yes, it's critical. It's important. You can't advertise for aspace medicine without without putting your own *** on the line. Exactly. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So. Products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about, or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh, those are some good products. Those are really good. Wait, can I just quickly recap what we've learned so far about his like, please do, please do. So he practices medicine sort of without any sort of credentials and then he goes to. An unaccredited university and doesn't finish and then opens up a medical practice and then gets arrested and then he buys a diploma. That without, you know, getting any sort of medical training or like any additional medical training, but because he has the diploma that he bought, he is now certified to practice medicine in eight states. Now is this the eclectic medicine or is this like the more legitimate medicine? It's athletic medicine. None of it's. I mean, yeah, it's eclectic medicine which is seen as semi legitimate at that point in time. I see. OK, great. Well, I mean. I'm proud of him and his accomplishments. He's so far. He's achieved his dreams. Yeah I'm sure nothing horrible will happen. Definitely not. So in 1916 Doctor Brinkley got a job at a meatpacking plant in Kansas City working as a doctor for the animals they kept on hand. He spent many hours on duty, bored and watching the most entertaining thing available to him in those pre television days. Billy goats *******. He later recalled being impressed by their considerable lubricity, which I think means the. Billy goat vaginas get really lubed up, but I'm I'm not really sure. I mean, yeah, the the main syllable there is is lubes, so that's that's why it's my guess. The root word. Yeah, so OK, the good he thought Billy goats ****** good, and he was also impressed by the fact that they got sick less than any other species of animal at the plant. So he started to think about what would it be possible to take some of the some of the traits of Billy Goat and put that into a person? OK. Can't wait to see where this is going. Yeah. It's important you understand the importance of what we're called glands to cutting edge medicine of the day. Now, glands were generally testicles from various species, including human beings. I'd like to read a quote from the website quackwatch that sort of sums up the building science in this period of of gland replacement. Charles Edward Brown Sicard, a noted French physiologist, had shocked the medical community by injecting himself with the crushed testicles of young dogs. And Guinea pigs. Afterwards, he claimed that he had regained the physical stamina and intellectual vigor of his youth. Many men availed themselves of sicard's methods, but once the placebo effect was filtered out, little remained. In Vienna, physiologist Eugene Steineck proposed that youthful vitality could be restored by increasing levels of testosterone. The easiest way to do this, Dynex said, was through vasectomy. Sperm production wasted testosterone, and if the channel leading from the testes to the ejaculatory duct were tied off, then blood levels of testosterone would rise. Brinkley. They also have heard of the work of Serge Voronov, a French Doctor Who was stirring up a storm of controversy with his experimental gland transplants. Voronov had been a physician in the court of the King of Egypt, and there had spent a great deal of time treating the court eunuchs, who suffered from a variety of illnesses. He hypothesized that maintaining active genital glands was the secret to health. As proof, he cited his experiments with an aging RAM, into which he had transplanted the testicles of a young lamb. The Rams will got thicker and his sexual vigor returned. Voronov then went on to transplant bits of monkey testes into aging men, he claimed. Success, although we could offer no scientific validation of his claim. So, OK, so science of this time was Hawking putting balls and yeah, just like just men being obsessed with their balls. And that has not changed to the science of today. You're absolutely right, yes. But in that point in time, they would look at other animals that had big balls or ****** a lot and be like, what have I put those balls in my balls? Yeah, and yeah, I mean. It's some innovative thinking. So yeah, it's it's innovative. So all this was cooking off in the air in the medical community while Brinkley was getting his start. Now, in mid 1917, he was briefly drafted by the military to work as a doctor for the 64th Infantry Division. He served a total of about two months, most of which he spent in sick Bay complaining of multiple rectal fistulas. He was kicked out of the military in August. Next Doctor Brinkley, and many moved to a little Kansas town called Milford. It was not quite in the middle of nowhere, but you might call it nowhere adjacent. Brinkley worked as a rural doctor again, and his wife worked as a midwife. They made enough money to get by, working incredibly hard and providing a useful service to their local community. Naturally, John Brinkley hated it and desperately wanted a way out. That way. He's like not enough balls. Not enough balls. Well, the good news is that he was about to get so many more balls than anybody should ever have. Thank goodness. He was approached one day by a 46 year old farmer named Bill Stittsworth. Now Stittsworth came by Brinkley's office one day and said there's something wrong with me though. Look at me. You wouldn't judge it. I do look Husky, don't I? When Brinkley nodded, Stittsworth continued. I'm all in no pep, I'm a flat tire now. This was stittsworth's way of slowly admitting in, you know, 19 like teens terms, that *** **** didn't work so well anymore. This shouldn't have been surprising. I think it's pretty normal for 46 year old men who work in intense, backbreaking. Physical labor job to have have trouble with that. In fact, it might be weirder if he'd had no issues at all, but Stittsworth complained to Doctor Brinkley that he'd tried serums, medicines, and electricity, all to no avail. Now, next, according to Legends that were later spread by Doctor Brinkley himself, the old farmer sighed and said, too bad I don't have Billy goat nuts. Yeah, good. We only have doctor Brinkley's recollections of what happened next, and they come from a biography he commissioned 20 years later called Life of a man. So you put a little bit of a little bit of salt on this next quote. Doctor Haff closed his eyes and considered, and then he shook his head slowly. The Code of Ethics his father had drilled into him forever forbade him from any conducts, especially with relation to healing, except the utterly honest and straightforward. But the father begged and begged, and eventually Brinkley agreed he would try and put goat testicles into the farmer's body. His official publications made it later seem like he was basically forced into it out of sheer empathy for the distraught patient. But years later, Stittsworth's family would admit that Brinkley had offered the old farmer hundreds and hundreds of dollars to let him experiment. On his body. Wow. So that's cool. Where's this farmer getting all this money for? For goat balls. The the farmer got the money from Doctor Brinkley. Oh, OK Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He bribed he bribed him to get let him put goat balls in him to test out the surgery. I see. OK yeah, yeah, yeah. So Doctor Brinkley removed a healthy goats testicles and just sort of shoved him inside the farmer's nutsack and then sewed it up. Yeah. OK, Stittsworth reported an increase in vitality, possibly due to the placebo effect, and also possibly due to just lying. The word spread across town, and soon another farmer, and then another, had received goat ball implants. Shortly thereafter, missed its worth, demanded that she get a set of goat ovaries to increase her own fertility and vitality. Next, according to life of a man, quote dimly, Brinkley had begun to realize that he was gifted beyond the run of doctors. So he he. Realized that he was an unusually talented surgeon and an unusually brilliant thinker due to the incredible success of his his goat testicle and ovary implants. Now, I don't know if you know this or not, but is he replacing the human testicles with the good stuff or he's just adding them in addition to what's already there? He's just jamming them up in there. OK, just shoving, shoving. Now. Sometimes it's just bits of goat testicles. He does it a little bit different every time because he's not a real doctor. Sure. I mean, who needs consistency when it comes to medical, medical procedures? So he decided that someone with his sheer God-given talent, could not limit themselves to the rules of the jealous sheep ethics of the American Medical Association and the other gradually professionalizing medical bodies of the era. Doctor Brinkley had developed an intense dislike of the AMA. Some of this may be due to the fact that a few weeks after his first goat ball implantation, he traveled to Chicago to take a refresher course on surgery. He failed the class. His teacher said that this was because of his attendance not being regular. And because of his indulgence in alcohol, I admonished him to leave liquor alone and to concentrate on worthwhile endeavor and improve himself as a man and a physician. To which he replied, I have a scheme up my sleeve, and the whole world will hear of it. OK, so he's just like this drunk dude who's like just a drunk guy putting balls, like loudly admitting that he's planning to scam everybody. And pretty successfully scamming everybody, yeah? Yeah, all right. In August 1918, John Brinkley opened to the Brinkley Institute of Health in Milford, KS. The growth of his clinic was massively aided by the fact that months after his surgery, Stittsworth and his wife had a boy. They named him Billy. No, after Billy goat. He became the first goat gland baby, and of course, his very existence was credited to Doctor Brinkley's Incredible science. More testimonials followed soon after the old farmer and business then poured into Doctor Brinkley's clinic. He began charging $750 in operation. That's about $14,000 in modern money, obviously. Yeah, it's expensive. It's like what you'd pay for major cosmetic surgery today. But it's just goat testicles, right? Now, obviously, many of these implantations did not work. Some of them, I mean, none of them worked, but many of them had disastrous side effects. But it is kind of how many people had goat testicle pieces put into their balls without anything terrible happening. The human body is incredible, is what I'm getting at. I mean, it's very resilient. Yes. Yeah. Part of why so many people reported incredible benefits undoubtedly owes to the placebo effect. Some of it, though, was due to Doctor Brinkley's peculiar advertising brilliance. Here's quack. Watch again. All men needed the Brinkley operation, he declared. But the procedure was most suited to the intelligent and least suited to the stupid type. This, of course, ensured that few of his patients would admit they had not benefited from the operation, so he warned people before going in that like it doesn't work on dumb people. Ohh. So he's kind of brilliant. So he's putting people in a position where they have to basically just lie and say, yeah, this is working out great for me, huh? OK, love, love. A lot of love. Heavy gas lighting in medical procedures as well. I mean, he he is the gaslighting as Doctor. I think I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, yeah. So wait, another question. He is mostly doing this for. Test he's putting testicles into men's balls. Yeah, sex. But there was at least one case of a woman having over another ovaries. OK, so there are. OK. All right, so he's just that he did more balls than ovaries, but he's maybe not equal, but like, you know, there's some. Yeah, he he ovaries up a lot of ladies. And actually, you know, spoilers, Caitlin. He's kind of a feminist icon, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Yeah, love it. Feminist icon, Goat ball Doctor, John Brinkley. Great, now right as the greatest grift of. Right as the greatest gift of Doctor Brinkley's life was kicking off the great influenza epidemic hit. This is the nightmarish rave wave of disease that killed more people than World War One. It was a terrible nightmare and completely counter to the rest of his life, doctor Brinkley Rose wonderfully to the situation. He was remembered by locals as being a wonderful doctor during this. Who only lost a single patient to the flu epidemic and worked all around, you know, offering people free care and what not to take care of the horribly ill people who were dying of the influenza. So. This is like a singular moment in his career. Like for this, this one period of time, he was a real doctor. And and then he just went right back to scamming people for the rest of his life. But there is one redeeming moment in his life, and it's the influenza epidemic. So all right, there you go. Yeah. Now, once the epidemic was over, Doctor Brinkley got right back to work, scamming the **** out of people. As his work drew attention and media coverage. People were soon literally camping out around his clinic, men and women, for a little while, implanting goat ovaries. And ladies was almost as booming a trade as implanting goat testicles in men got. Brinkley claimed the ovaries would enhance fertility but would also remove. Ankles and increased breast size. So I mean everything that a woman cares about, everything that a woman cares about. And one set of severed goat ovaries. I'm going to go get my goat ovaries right after we're done, I mean. You know, I I don't wanna, I don't want to spoil the next ad break, but we are selling goat ovary pills for a limited time. Yeah, guaranteed to do whatever, whatever you need. Go to ovaries will take care of it. Yeah. So now obviously a lot of Brinkley's patients got sick and died because he was just filling people up with the dead body parts of animals. And that's not great for you, but the Internet didn't exist. And so Doctor Brinkley was able to sort of fill the media of the day with tales of his patients quote astonishing sexual vigor, and most people just sort of trusted him. He also shared case studies of patients whose lives were changed in more significant ways. One popular account was of a boy Brinkley described as deranged who in his words, quote, had been told. Finally, that he was incurable and must remain a mental defective, defective. He had decided to commit suicide if I failed to remedy his condition. In 36 hours after the insertion of goat glands, this patient's temperature had risen to above 103 Fahrenheit, but became normal 24 hours later and has since remained so. His mind is gradually cleared. He looks and feels younger and is contemplating marriage. The hideous dreams and nightmares which had destroyed his sleep and rest all his past life have left him. My second case of insanity, caused this time by excessive ************ was a young bank. Brought to me from a state institution following gland transplantation, his mind cleared completely and he is now the head of a large banking institution. I mean, those are some ringing endorsements. Now, it's interesting to me that goat testicles can both increase your vitality and and help you get erections to impregnate your wife and stop your excessive ************ so that you can become a bank president and also apparently cure mental illness and depression. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't goat balls clear depression? Exactly. Yeah, that's just the obvious, right? So within a couple of years, John Brinkley. That identified 27 different illnesses that could be cured by goat balls, everything from dementia to farting. He assured people that his operations had a 95% success rate, which was just low enough to explain away the odd death or life altering infection as a result of his not entirely competent surgical administrations. As a rule, Brinkley was way worse at surgery than he was at selling his slogans. All energy is sex energy, and a man is as old as his glands. We're both pretty great. I mean, what year was this? I mean that that's this is 19. 18 wow. Like, all energy is sex. Energy is like something you'd hear at a ******* very specific kind of yoga retreat in Santa Monica. I feel like I tweeted that like 2 days ago. Incredible, because he was ahead of his time and will consistently be ahead of his time until the day he dies. All right, but I don't want to. I don't want to spoil things too much. So in private doctor Brinkley had a habit of calling his patients old fools, especially while drinking, but in public he was the picture of the genteel man of medicine. Much of his credibility came from the Van **** goatee he wore, which was seen as the hallmark of the doctor because people back then were very dumb, just as they all are now. The reality, of course, is that. John Brinkley was no more a doctor than I am a mechanic just because I was able to hit my car that one time and make the engine turnover according to the book charlatan, he only had a wavering conception of how to perform his own signature surgery. Quote sometimes he slivered the animal gland like a clove of garlic and put the pieces in the patient. Sometimes he joined the smaller testicle to the larger, a process he likened to embedding a marble in an apple. Sometimes the operation was yeah, that's that's pretty ****** **. I'm So grossed out. OK, sometimes the operation was no more complex than tossing a Christmas present into a bag. Skill wasn't the issue, technically speaking, he was a competent surgeon when he put his mind to it, but quality control was iffy at best. Brinkley performed operations both before and after the cocktail hour, and as his enterprise expanded, he passed off more and more of the work to assistance with medical credentials, even wispier than his own. As a result, dozens of patients died over the years, either in the operating room or shortly after their return home. Many others were permanently. Named, so that's. Cool. Very cool. Wait, can I backtrack for just one second? And so his like, credibility or the reason like people trusted him was largely, did you say, because of his goatee? Like his facial hair? OK, so he had he had the kind of facial hair all doctors were supposed to have. OK, I didn't realize that was a thing. #1 number two were they called goatees back then? And did that have anything to do with the fact that people trusted his goat? Because if it was like he has. Hot, and then he puts goat balls into your body. I see what you're getting at. But no, they called it a Van ****. Sophie will show you the picture of him, and you can see, like, once you see his facial hair, you'll recognize it as like, every doctor in, like, a 1940s like, Looney Tunes cartoon has the same hair. Yeah. You see that? Yeah. OK OK yeah. It's wild that you could just have a certain type of facial hair and be like, yes, this is my profession. Well, I guess he's a doctor. Look at his facial hair. Ohh man, there is there was the world like we get down on the Internet because all the Nazis and the the the anti vaccine lies and stuff. But before the Internet, being a doctor just meant having a goatee and a lab coat. So it's it's not like people have ever been very good at vetting reality. Yes, I suppose some progress has been made since then, yeah. It's it's just been a consistently mixed bag, yeah. Doctor Brinkley build the purpose of his work is aiding hopeless couples and conceiving children. He's so he slid articles into the local news with titles like Doctor J Brinkley Swamped with letters from women craving Halo of motherhood. And the reality is that a lot of desperate people did see him as something of a fertility Messiah. At one point he claimed to be able to even reverse hysterectomies by shoving goat ovaries inside ladies. By the summer of 1920, he'd pretty much. But by the summer of 1920 he'd pretty much stopped performing surgery on female clients. It's debatable as to why. My suspicion would be that stuff like male vitality is easy to boost via the placebo elect alone affect alone since erections are largely mental. So if you tell some guy he's got supercharged goat balls in his body, maybe he actually gets more erections. But you can't really trick women into having a uterus like the placebo effect doesn't go that far. Robert, think again, because I think you could trick me into thinking. Had a uterus. If I didn't, which I don't want my uterus. So actually, that brings me to me, trying to sell my uterus right here on this. And then you can put it. What? OK, hang on. What if there was a sick goat and you took out my uterus and gave it to the goat? I feel like based on everything we've learned so far, that would actually help the sick goat. You know, you're you're thinking like a 1920s doctor because right around this time, I think it was a French physician. Took a monkeys ovaries and put it in a woman just to see if he could make a monkey human hybrid? No. Why would he want to do that? They were just trying anything. They would throw everything at the wall. Days of medicine, like, there were no rules. There was no like, like, people tried to do everything because they like, they just figured out, like, antibiotics, which is like, you know, you. You come from the era when, like, getting like, scraped by a wooden sliver on your way out to the barn is a death sentence. And antibiotics seem like ******* magic. So people are just like, anything's possible. Yeah, they they they tried everything. So is is like, all of this is really ridiculous and the incredible doctors of the day are all against Brinkley and say he's crazy, which we will talk about a lot more later. But people aren't quite as dumb as they would have been in another era to believe this stuff worked just because a lot of medicine was ******* nonsense back then, right? Yeah, right. So we will continue talking about Doctor John Brinkley and his nonsense medicine, but you know what's not nonsense, Caitlin? The products that we're about to tell you about, well, you got it half right, but you forgot the services and the services, yes. You never want to forget the services. Yeah. A service without a product is like a product without a service. Exactly. Exactly products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or that I should have asked you to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people. Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment. We can't save chimps, forests or anything else, and that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So if you just called me a nerd, which I I don't appreciate. Sophie, Sophie, would you, would you kindly, since I'm not there right now, throw the throw the throwing bagels across the room in anger for me? Hold on. She's gonna get throwing bagels. Well, she does that. I'm going to keep reading about Doctor Brinkley. So in 1921, Brinkley had attained enough renown that he was able to visit Park Ave Hospital in Chicago and perform 34 gonad transplants. He had moved on from just operating on local farmers. One of his patients was a judge. Another was the Chancellor of the university's law school, a guy named J Tobias. When the Syracuse Herald interviewed Tobias after and asked if he felt younger, he said, I feel 25 years younger. I'm a new man. Pep, strong, healthy, ready to go on with my work. I was ill, old and played out, but the operation has revivified me. Next, the reporter asked, how does it feel to have been old and then be young again? Glorious. It is so wonderful. It is almost unbelievable. The public cannot appreciate what the operation means. There has been some levity over the news of gland operations, but they should be treated with the greatest respect and admiration. So this is this is how he moves on from like, I'm going to give you erections with goat balls, I will literally make you younger with goat testicles. And, like, because people want to be younger so badly, a whole lot of distinguished men just buy. Right into it. Right. First of all, can I say that I love your old timey voice. Thank you. Very proud of it. Yeah, you're doing a great job. Secondly, it's wild. I mean, I guess this isn't specific to men, but I guess because we're talking about, I mean, men are mostly his patients, but the lengths that men will go to, to just try to **** better and have better balls and stuff, yeah, it's it's amazing. Yeah, it is. I feel like if instead of fire the first human invention had been Viagra like men at least would never have invented. Anything else like it would have, it would have all been on women. They would, yeah, concrete and stuff like men would just be no, we've got, we've got *** **** pill. What else do we need? Which, honestly, I wish that had happened, because I think the world would be a much better place if women had invented every thousand times better. Ohh man, we gotta go back. Let's get a time machine. Go back to, you know, Neanderthal days, you know, caveman times and just give, give the the men Viagra and then be like, all right, ladies. The your the your path is is free and clear to do whatever you want. Pills will make you *****. Do whatever you want, ladies. Take it away. Here's. It's all on you now. No one can help if only so. For a long time, John Brinkley was able to basically portray himself as the man who had conquered aging. He began to make bold claims about his ability to cure other diseases like blindness and the very near future. His delusions of grandeur were compelling to people who saw him at symposiums and at his office. They were less compelling to the people who worked with him on a daily basis. For one thing, John still drank way too much. One night he got wasted and destroyed his neighbor's car with an axe for unclear but certainly awesome reasons. Another time. He got plowed and chased a bunch of his own patients out of his hospital with a butcher knife. In March of 1921, one of his neighbors filed a protection order against the Good Doctor, Brinkley explained. I made some remarks concerning this fellow that caused him to be afraid, I guess, and they put me under a bond. I don't know whether I was arrested or not, but I had to give a bond of $1000 not to shoot him. I don't know whether I was arrested or not, and I think, I don't think he's lying about that. I think he was so drunk, ****** **. Like, yeah, I don't know what the **** happened. I chase people with weapons all the time. Yikes. This is the stuff that makes me almost like him because it makes me feel like he's a kindred spirit. Because I I I don't know if you know this about me, Caitlin, but I love chasing my patients and neighbors with knives. It's just a good time. Everybody has fun. You get your cardio in? Yeah. Just yeah. Good, good, good. Everything's great. Anyway, there was a rumor that Doctor Brinkley's assistant Doctor Osborne who was one eared. Was one eared because Doctor Brinkley had literally bitten the other ear off. Oh my God. Entirely possible that this is the case like. A lot of people lost ears for random reasons back then, but yeah, he he seems like he might have been an ear biter. Yeah, it would not be the craziest thing he did, but no amount of bad behavior from Doctor Brinkley was enough to turn the town of Milford against him. The huge amount of money he brought in helped, and by the early 20s, he was performing 50 operations a month, which meant his clinic was bringing in $500,000 a year in 1920s money. That's roughly $7 million a year today. So he's he's doing well for himself. Yeah, and a decent chunk of that money got reinvested back into Milford. He paid for new sidewalks, a new sewer, electric lights, a paved road to the railroad station, and a new bank. He tried to start a zoo and even bought the town a bear. Unfortunately, the bear was too loud and it kept Doctor Brinkley awake at night, so he shot it to death. He bought the town a bear. He sure did. Just a bear to hang around. OK, it was too loud, but it was shot at a bunch. Oh my gosh, I'm just thinking of of Paddington. Paddington bear. And anyway, that's not important. OK, here's my real question. Where is he getting all of the goat balls, goats, and in fact, patients could pick out they had a pen of goats and patients would pick out the goat they wanted their balls from. So it was like going to a nice, like one of those fancy steak restaurants where you get to like pick the animal, right. You get to, you get to pick your goat or like a lobster in a lobster. OK. Yeah. So I understand that. Go by the lobster. It's testicles. Yeah. So I understand that goat balls come from goats. I'm not, I don't know who Romulus is, but I do know that much. But so he's like he's is he breeding the goats and how could he even breed them if he's taking all their balls away? And then also like, that has to me, that's so many. Goat? Yeah. I mean, he's he's he's buying a lot of goats. OK. He's buying 50 goats a month or so, which is a sizable number of goats. And then just, like, castrating them and then. Yeah. Yeah. Did the goats, did they live after that? OK. He's eating the goat could stay alive without balls, but I assume they were eaten after that. I don't really know, though, you know? Well, also have been written about his goats. Want to know more about his ghosts? So he's. I feel like because you're such a ****** surgeon and he is drunk all the time, he's probably just accidentally killing these goats when he's, like, castrating them or whatever. I'm going to guess he wasn't very careful with the goat. Definitely not. I feel so bad for all these goats. Oh my, these poor goats. Yeah, the goats are bear victim and the bear is a victim. All of the people who got goat balls shoved into them, I would say also victims. Yeah, I feel less. Bad for them than the bear, because the bear didn't do ******* anything. No, like neither did the goats. I just don't like goats as much as I like bears. And that's, I guess, racism on my part. That's fine with it. I mean, there's no Paddington goat, so I get it. There's no Paddington goat and there's no goat on the California State flag. True. But goats are baby goats are so cute the way they jump around. And, yeah, they're double. Yeah, very cute, very cute animals. Now, anyway, I know what you're wondering at this point, Caitlin. What kind of goat? What kind of goat did he get? The testicles. I do wonder that because I don't really know the different types of goats. Well, he he preferred to use Toggenburg goat balls because he thought they were better balls. One time he did have a set of patients from California. Who demanded that he put angora goat testicles in them? I mean, I guess because angora goats are used to make very fancy sweaters. Yeah. Yeah. And so they wanted they wanted the fanciest goats because they were Californians, obviously. Apparently, angora goat testicles stank horribly and made the testicles of his customers stink horribly. So this, this was one of the issues that he encountered in his goat ball practice. So because I'm sure they're they're they're balls smelled fine otherwise without the angora goat. Like people aren't bathing every day back then certain they're 1920s balls smelled wonderful before the goats. Yeah, OK, so wait, what is the first type of goat you said? Tot Toggenburg goats toggenburg. I've never heard if you type of goat. Well now, Caitlin, if you're ever at a party and someone's like, hey, if I want to replace my testicles with goat testicles, what type of goat should I use? You'll know it's a Toggenburg. Yes. There's there's no other goat to replace your testicles with. And rest assured that every party I go to, that question is being asked. So, oh, I know, I know. We go to a lot of the same parties. And I'm, I'm usually shouting about goat testicles at at any given one of them can confirm. Hmm. Now the the issues of patients occasionally demanding smelly goat testicles was minor compared to the major issue presented by real Doctor Morris Fishbein. Now, Fishbein was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, and Fishbein was like an actual doctor. And the the AMA, at this point, you know, they still did some stuff that we would consider quackery. They were trying to apply real science to medicine, so they were gradually learning what didn't work, as opposed to just continuing to jam goat testicles. People, right? For huge amounts of money anyway, according to Quackwatch Fish being quote called Brinkley a smooth tongue charlatan, and urged the authorities to revoke his right to practice Brinkley's assertion that his procedure could cure conditions ranging from insanity to acne to influenza, and high blood pressure amounted to quackery, Fishbein said. In response to this, Brinkley called the American Medical Association a meat cutters union and charged that its members were jealous of him because they were losing business. So by 1922, John Brinkley had gotten rich enough selling quack. Nonsense remedies to make vain men feel younger that there was really only one place on Earth for him to go next. Los Angeles. Obviously, yeah. Yeah, that's where you go. That's where you go. There he met up with Harry Chandler, the owner of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler had invited him out to California in the 1st place to do a story on him, because Harry Chandler was the true paragon of journalism. He intended to do this story by having Doctor Brinkley insert goat testicles into one of his editors. He told John, quote, if the operation is a success, I'll make you the most famous surgeon in America. If it's a failure, I'll damn you with the same gusto. Now, the issue that confronted Dr Brinkley is that under California law, his medical license was not valid. Thankfully, this was the 1920s and Harry Chandler was able to secure him a 30 day permit to practice medicine. And so Doctor John Brinkley began cutting out goat testicles and sticking them inside human beings once more. He implanted new balls and Chandler's editor in a US Circuit Court judge in several unnamed movie stars. And according to rumor, even in Harry Chandler himself, many of his patients gave his work rave reviews, as can be seen in the title of this 1922. Play Times article New Life in glands Dr Brinkley patients here show improvement many victims of incurable diseases are cured. 1200 operations all are successful. Do you think like, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton have entirely possible goat balls in their bodies? I think, yeah, he even, I think he met Buster Keaton. And Buster Keaton made a movie in this time that referenced goat gland operations. Really? It's entirely yeah, it's entirely possible. Like, we know several movie stars because it's like they're movie stars. If you tell them you can make them young again and **** better. Exactly. Like that's that's Hollywood's never changed. No. Like if he came to town today and people believed this, like, ******* every famous guy in town would be, yeah, who else? Fatty Arbuckle. Was that a I feel like that was a guy from that era. I should know this. I've, I've several. Funny Arbuckle was a guy. This is before he crushed that woman to death accidentally. Well, that's probably not what happened, but that's what he got. That's what he got tired for. It seems like he kind of got screwed over on that one and may have actually been a nice guy. I don't know if they are now either. Do some research about it. Yeah, I did. Did we talk about it in the episode about the Nazis in Hollywood? Speaking of which, Nazis do come into this story later. Yeah, it's it's it's gonna be fun now. After performing $40,000 worth of operations, John Brinkley hit upon the idea of expanding his practice. He decided to open a new clinic in Ensenada, California. I secured a location at Ensenada because of what appeared to be climactic conditions peculiarly favorable to goat gland operations. To perform the operation most successfully, the surgeon should be located with a climate ranges around 70 degrees and is not subject to sharp changes. So you really want those cool Southern California. Freezes on your goat balls. Yes, you do. Of course you do. Of course you do. That's just basic science. Yeah, absolutely. But alas, John Brinkley's ability to practice in the Golden State relied on his ability to get a permanent medical license there. And this was something the state of California was unwilling to grant him. Due in large part to the crusading work of Doctor Morris Fishbein, Brinkley found himself denied and forced back to Milford. John put a good face on it, claiming he'd never really wanted to move out to California anyway, and that everyone knew the calm restorative. Hours of the Kansas countryside were better for a hospital than stupid old California. Yeah, they were. Yeah. The reality is that he was deeply worried. Morris Fishbein and the AMA were increasingly writing his ***. For all of the, you know, the dangerously unregulated surgery that he was performing, Brinkley fired back by having his publicity people shoot out even more testimonials from satisfied goat testicle recipients. Testimonials. Testimonials. I didn't even get that. That's good. Thank you. That's what I'm here for. Testimonials. Yeah, we'll make that. Sophie, can we T-shirt that? She's nodding. Not reluctantly. She's nodding enthusiastically. Hmm. So anyway, maybe Goat Ball recipient T-shirts that just say. I have a goats testicles. I mean we'll we'll work on the poppy. We'll, we'll, we'll keep, we'll keep, we'll keep bringing that back and forth. Brinkley's biggest coup was Senator Wesley Staley of Colorado, who called Brinkley and his wife quote two of the finest people and the greatest benefactors to mankind on Earth. I wear goat glands, and I'm proud of it. That's what we put on the shirt. And then, below that testy monial testimonial, Dr Brinkley collected 100 different testimonials testimonials and into a book called Shadows and Sunshine, and published it in an effort to fight back against what he claimed was the AMA's dangerous misinformation. The AMA tried to repost, most notably with a series of posters titled testimonials are Worthless, which featured testimonials from patients claiming to have been cured of various diseases from quack medicine on one side, and then those patients death certificates listing the cause of death. The exact illness they claimed to have had cured on the other side, these facts had close to 0 impact on the American people. Folks still clambered to spend 65? Yeah, yeah, exactly. People still were more than willing to spend $750 each on goat glance. But what about the folks who were too poor for Doctor Brinkley's revolutionary testicle surgery? Well, according to the book charlatan quote, Brinkley had this angle covered already with his special gland emotion, which he sold. Mail order for $100, rectal syringe included. Oh, wait, hang on. If you couldn't afford to get goat balls implanted in your body, you would send you a bunch of ground up goat testicles and an *** syringe. OK, let me be clear about this if you absolutely. I feel like you don't need a syringe to insert something into your ******. Your ****** is already like, has an opening that you can put stuff in there. Why would you really want, you want to squirt this stuff up there? You really want to. I mean, I don't know if you've ever squirted, squirted ground up goat testicles inside your ******* but you you really want to you want to get them right up in them guts, OK, right up in them guts that because that's where testicles do their most important work is right up in them guts. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. OK. Of course, of course, this is just basic science. We all, we all, we all graduated 8th grade. We know how science works. You shut you, you shove the goat balls as far up your *** as you can go, and then you're healthy again. OK, I just. I'm like, I want to puke at the thought of a rectal syringe. One of the worst combination of words that that I can imagine. OK, I'm ready. Of course people imitated Dr Brinkley's goat gland products. There was the youth Gland Chemical Laboratory of Illinois, the Vitalo Gland Company of Denver. Glandale plantone glandine. Americans in the 1920s absolutely could not get enough glands. The money flowed in, and John Brinkley eventually realized that he needed to do something with it. He decided to build a radio transmitter in 19. Expect? Yeah. You didn't call that, did you? Nobody, nobody calls that **** yeah? Yeah, he decides to build a radio transmitter. In 1923 he got his first broadcasting license and started construction of a massive transmitting tower, one of the very first in the American Midwest. Now, radio wasn't really something that existed in a big way back then. It was early enough in the history of the medium that there was actually quite a bit of debate as to whether or not advertising should even be allowed on the radio. Most of what was out there was just broadcasts of Symphony orchestras and other really boring ******** Brinkley Station K FKB, which stood for Kansas first. Hands us best was going to be different. While he waited for construction to be completed, John Brinkley and Minnie left the critical business of implanting goat balls into people to their assistants and went on an ocean liner voyage to Asia. They stopped in China, where Doctor Brinkley inserted goat testicles into the President of the Bank of Peking. Then they steamed hard to Japan, where Brinkley proceeded to insert more goat glands into more human males. On April 21st, 1923, the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel ran this article gland transplantation, now used by Japan to put aged, infirm back at work. High class goat prices soar. OK. Quote from that article goat gland transplantation has been made compulsory in Japan by the government in order to rejuvenate aged charity patients. Within the past few months, more than two thousand of these inmates have been undergone the operation and are all again earning their own living. So that's exciting. Yeah. It was a, it was a lie, obviously. I mean, yes, it was. But also if you, if you look at it from the point of view that it's not a lie, he's actually like a really good person. Yeah. If you if you pretend it's not a lie, he's an incredible doctor. I'm surprised that he, when you were saying earlier that he like sank so much of his money into like, helping his town and I mean buying a bear that he did later shoot and kill. But I mean. He is. I suppose he's he's more philanthropic than I would have imagined. But yeah, and we'll get to that in a little bit. Some of that may have been self preservation because it pays off for him in a big way in the second part of this story. Yeah, but I think also he just kind of wanted to be the biggest man in town. And if you're going to be the biggest man in town and you don't want people to hate you, you gotta bribe them with a nice things, right? Right, OK. So Doctor Brinkley, through his interlocutors in the media, began to claim that the goat glands he was putting in people did more than just restore their vitality. They helped breed a better class of human being. It was thinking that was deliriously in line with the popular eugenics talking points of the day. As one of his minions, doctor WH blue of New York City, told reporters, the children of parents who have been endowed with goat glands are healthy and alert to an unusual degree. New glands mean not only new vitality to men and women now living, but they actually mean better babies, I say in this. Then, making possible a superior type of human being, Doctor Brinkley has made a discovery of the first importance to mankind. So wait, is this the part of the story that the Nazis come in? Because I no, shockingly enough, this is not the part of the story where the Nazis come into it. Yeah, right now Doctor Brinkley was in reality about to make a discovery that would change the course of mankind and all of our lives forever. But that discovery had nothing to do with goat glands. It is, however, going to come next in Part 2 of the Epic tale of John Brinkley, the man who loved adding the balls of other. Animals to the balls of human beings. What a good cliffhanger. Thank you. Thank you. I was. I was proud of that one, too. Yeah. Caitlin, you want to plug some plegables? Sure. Don't don't don't plug goat glands into the audience, because there's been enough of that done already. Well, I guess I have to undo some damage I did to my patients. Now, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Durante. That's Caitlin. And then you can listen to the Bechdel cast, my podcast about the representation of women in movies that super producer Sophie, sitting right next to me, also produces. And, you know, there hasn't been a biopic made about John Brinkley, but if there what it was, you can bet your *** we would have covered it on the Bechdel cast. And you know what? I I think it would pass the Bechdel test because John Brinkley was a feminist icon. Yes, and actually little known fact placing the testicles of goats in to a human man. The act of that, surprisingly enough, does pass the Bechdel test. Yeah, that's a that's a little discussed corollary to the Bechdel test that you can either have two women have a conversation that that doesn't involve a man or a relationship, or you can have somebody insert goat testicles into a human scrotum. Right. And I'm glad that we've cleared that up right now. Right now, it's important, yes. So, yeah, check out my podcast. And, yeah, follow me on those places. OK you can find me on Twitter at I write OK you can find me on the gram as the kids call it at at ******** pod and also you can find this. Podcast on the Gramanet ******** pod. You can't find me there because Sophie runs both of those. Because I am not allowed. But that's for for the best. For the best. I'm sure she's nodding. Is she nodding Caitlin yes enthusiastically? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems right. You can find T-shirts on teepublic.com. I have another podcast called. It could happen here. If you feel like after this lively story of testicle implants, you want to hear a horrifying predictions of the civil war in modern America. You're a weirdo. But. With that podcast exists, maybe check it out, yeah. That's that's all I got. I love. Testicles. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization. Of your podcast, go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey, I don't know less. Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts this fall. On revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life.