Amazing Medical Stories (12 page)

A farmer known as “Mr. X” is said to have been the first patient to undergo Brinkley's innovative new therapy. The poor fellow visited the doctor secretly to express concern about his dramatically diminished libido. During their conversation, Brinkley jokingly commented that the man would not have any problem if had a pair of “those buck goat's glands in him.” The farmer must have visualized the sexual stamina of his own goats and was captivated by such an exciting possibility. He implored the doctor to “put them in.”

At first Brinkley had misgivings about performing this surgery, but then he relented, saying he felt compelled to help a patient who was desperate to find a medical solution for his “sagging” sex drive. Using a local anaesthetic, Brinkley carried out the strange procedure. He inserted a pair of testicles from a Tottenburg goat into the anatomically correct area of the man's body. Brinkley was delighted when later he learned that the goat testicles the farmer now possessed had, according to him, greatly enhanced his sex life. Even more remarkably, a year later, the man's wife is said to have given birth to a baby boy who was most appropriately named Billy.

After performing a number of his goat-gland transplant operations, Brinkley realized that he had discovered a way to make a great deal of money. He began to promote the surgery, mainly by gathering testimonials from grateful men who were willing to pay as much as a thousand dollars to regain their lost virility.

In 1918, buoyed by his success, Brinkley built a hospital where a number of patients could be treated. One of his marketing ploys was to offer prospective patients the unique privilege of choosing the goat that
was to be sacrificed for their testicular implantation. To give his hospital more credibility, Brinkley also had a photograph of the Mayo Clinic hanging on his office wall. He began to describe himself as the hospital's Chief Surgeon, and he added M.D.C.M., Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other credentials after his name.

News of Brinkley's phenomenal treatment was soon finding its way into the major newspapers. But when high-profile physicians were asked to comment on the goat-gland surgery, they invariably branded it as being entirely unsupported by scientific evidence. They also warned that it was potentially dangerous, and a number of deaths may have been linked to the procedure. One of Brinkley's most vocal critics was Dr. Morris Fish-bein, the editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
. For many years, Fishbein wrote scathing articles about the man, whom he considered to be a quack. Brinkley hated him, and often he accused the American Medical Association of being intent on destroying an “outstanding pioneer in medical research.” Some of Brinkley's loyal fans insisted that his achievements were in the same league as those of Louis Pasteur, the famous French chemist.

Amazingly, although there was growing opposition to his grotesque therapy, Brinkley's practice flourished. He began to give regular “health talks” on KFKB, Milford's radio station, which he just happened to own. Listeners as far away as Ontario could tune in to his “gland lectures,” and apparently a few Canadians made the long trip to his hospital.

Always a brilliant entrepreneur, Brinkley recognized that it would be foolhardy for him to rely on making his goat-gland surgery the sole source of his income. He began to focus on other “male problems,” including offering a “guaranteed” prostate treatment. But when he came up with the idea of radio consultations, he really hit the jackpot. Both his popularity and his income began to skyrocket. With the cooperation of several hundred greedy druggists, he was soon prescribing huge numbers of his mailorder prescriptions and earning as much as ten thousand dollars a week.

In the mid-1930s, when he was making regular summer cruises to the Atlantic region, Brinkley was a very rich man. American family doctors around the same period were earning an average of thirty-five hundred dollars a year, and specialists had yearly incomes of about seven thousand

The operating room, Brinkley Hospital, Milford, Kansas.
THE BRINKLEY OPERATION

dollars. Brinkley's estimated income in 1937 was a million dollars. But his crooked ways were bound to catch up with him, and when he became aware of the possibility of serious legal problems, he decided to leave Kansas and move to Del Rio, Texas, where he built himself a magnificent mansion. In his palatial new home he hung a huge photograph of himself wearing the uniform — unbelievably — of an admiral in the Kansas navy.

It is understandable that the residents of Liverpool were swept away by this charming man and his lavish lifestyle. The diamond watch and tie pins he liked to wear certainly helped create the fabulous image he loved to convey, as did the twenty-one-man crew who served on his yacht and had “Dr. Brinkley” emblazoned on their uniforms. As well, he liked to boast about the Lockheed Electra airplane he owned (which was eventually sold and used by the Royal Canadian Air Force for training purposes). Yes, the American millionaire yachtsman captivated the townsfolk of the seaside community.

One might have expected Brinkley to be smart enough to save some of his accumulated wealth and to give up his medical chicanery. He might then have been able to retreat quietly to his Texas estate to enjoy a tranquil retirement. But that did not happen.

In his excellent book,
The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley
, author Gerald Carson provides an engrossing chronicle of this man's extraordinary
life and untimely death. Carson reports that Brinkley died of a heart attack on March 26, 1942. Only fifty-six years old, he had been forced to declare bankruptcy and was facing a serious complaint filed by the United States Post Office. The complaint alleged that he was using the mails to “defraud in connection with his goat-gland treatment.” It also stated that he and his group “did falsely pretend that John Brinkley was a great surgeon, scientist and physician, and that he, while visiting medical centres in Europe, had found a substance which would restore to normal sex vigour sexually weak men and women, and that the Brinkley treatment would cause men and women to live to be one hundred years old.”

No doubt Brinkley was an outright con man, but he was also an astute businessman. Long before the advent of Viagra, he cleverly exploited a human frailty and made millions by misleading thousands of people. His claim, that he had found the secret to rekindling a man's sex life, was universally appealing. Carson laments that it is most unfortunate that Brinkley didn't direct his abilities towards more legitimate goals. He suggests that he might then have made a significant contribution to the field of medicine.

Brinkley certainly did make an intriguing contribution to a small town's history. He left behind memories of a dapper and charming American who was leading a life that the local residents could only envy. No wonder the Liverpool newspaper would bid him a fond farewell when his yacht departed the harbour. On these momentous occasions, the owners of fishing schooners and many small boats would show their respect by blowing their vessels' horns to wish him bon voyage, thus saluting one of North America's most notorious and successful charlatans.

Dorothy Grant

It was a cold January day in 1942, and the snow whirled and blew outside the windows of the old farmstead in Kennetcook. A four-year-old boy whimpered in his mother's arms as she sponged off the thin trickle of pus that oozed from her son's left ear. His temperature was high, and the loud crying of hours earlier had turned to ominous silence. His mother had called for Dr. Wright hours earlier, but nothing could move over the four-foot drifts that had buried all the roadways. Suddenly she saw a flicker of light in the field. Fatigue must be playing tricks on her eyes. Then she thought she heard a low droning noise like an airplane engine, but none of the aircraft at the nearby air base would be in the sky in weather like this. Then she saw it, a rooster plume of snow in the back field, thrown up by a strange propeller-driven vehicle, the weirdest contraption ever to grace her farm. It glided in past the old weathered barn and through the rickety front gate. An overcoat-clad figure, black bag in hand, rose and strode toward the front door of the farmhouse. The doctor had arrived. Dr. Wright quickly diagnosed the little boy as having mas-toiditis, a serious infection of the bone behind the ear, and he drained the infected mastoid cavity right there on the old pine kitchen table. The child would make it, thanks to Dr. Wright and his mechanical sleigh.

Though no relation to Orville and Wilbur Wright, Dr. Robert Wright nevertheless deserves a place in the annals of transportation history. It all began in 1940, when he was a young family doctor fresh out of Dal-housie Medical School. Robert Wright and his wife Ritta settled in the little hamlet of Noel. Located on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, the town was originally an Acadian village dating from the 1700s. Founded in late December, it had been poetically dubbed Noel in honour of Christmas.

The local people, glad to see a new medic in the neighbourhood, welcomed the young couple with open arms. Dr. Annie Hennigar, one of the era's few female practitioners, was especially glad to see Robert so that she could cut back on her gruelling hours. She told him that he was welcome to do everything he wanted except pull teeth. That was to remain her domain.

The 1940s were the golden age of the medical house call, and Robert's practice covered a large geographic area. Furthermore, Noel and the surrounding communities were widely spread up and down the Fundy coast. Included in Dr. Wright's new domain was the County Home in Maitland, twenty miles from his dwelling, a daunting distance in these days. Among the forms of transportation the doctor used were a horse and buggy and a battered, but still serviceable, Model T Ford. Parts were scarce, there being a war on, but somehow Guy and Hollis Blackburn, mechanical geniuses and owners of the local service station, kept the car on the road.

The winter of 1940-1941 proved to be a hard one, with huge snowdrifts and nearly impossible travelling conditions. Fortunately, the Highway Department had introduced something which had never before graced the shore road: a snowplow. On its maiden voyage, the plow wended its way westward. Party lines hummed as people called family and friends giving a minute-by-minute rundown on the vehicle's exact locale. No one wanted to miss this feat of human ingenuity as it cut a swath through blizzard-blanketed roadways. Robert and Ritta received a breathless call that the plow would arrive any minute. When it did, they noticed with disappointment that it was riding on top of the drifts, leaving the road little if any clearer behind than in front, and gradually it was bogging down in the increasingly heavy snow. The Blackburn boys finally hauled the plow into their garage to see what they could do, but even their skills were not up to making the contraption snow-worthy. It took a week and nine men with shovels to get the vehicle the nine miles back to where it belonged.

Robert was no further ahead with his winter-travel dilemma until one of the Blackburn boys had a brilliant idea. Using two-inch copper plumbing pipe, the duo constructed a frame and mounted it on four skis crafted by Steve Hennigar, who was a master woodworker as well as Dr. Annie's brother. A Model A engine was mounted securely on the back, and a seat, steering gear, windscreen and headlight were bolted into place on the chassis. For the
pièce de résistance
, Steve Hennigar had made a wooden

Dr. Robert Wright's snow plane, with designer Hollis Blackburn (left) and Pearl O'Brien (right), in 1941. When Dr. Wright wasn't using it, the propellor-driven vehicle was used to sell World War II Victory Bonds.
ROBERT AND RITTA WRIGHT

propeller, and this was attached at the rear end of the Model A power plant. The engine started, and Steve's prop proved to be perfectly balanced, a neat achievement with a hand lathe. Thus was born the first snowmobile these parts had seen.