Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2004
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 141.
Abstract
R. Alton Lee has produced an engaging book that details the full life of John R. Brinkley. As someone interested in quackery in the US, I already knew Brinkley as an exemplar of this genre, but there is much more to him. He was a complex man who carried many labels, some contradictory: quack, caring healer; devoted family man, liar and con-man; would be Governor, community booster, and radio station entrepreneur, the latter as a way to promote mail-order sales of his medical remedies and also to draw in patients to his hospital.
Lee's biography is an informative and entertaining account of this larger-than-life character. The author tells of Brinkley's medical education at the eclectic Bennett Medical College in Chicago while working nights at Western Union to support his wife and family, of his itinerant medical practices as an "undergraduate physician" in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Arkansas, ending up in Kansas with a new wife and family. It was in Kansas that he obtained his MD degree from the Kansas City College of Medicine and Surgery, formerly the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas, which shortly thereafter was revealed by the Kansas City Star to be a diploma mill selling medical degrees (with a high school diploma if needed) for $1,000. Lee then follows Brinckley's life as a doctor providing, to put it mildly, unorthodox treatments for impotence (goat testicle transplants) and prostate problems (injections of colored water after a partial vasectomy). His wife, also an "MD" from the KC College of Medicine and Surgery, was an associate in his practice.
Lee recounts Brinkley's flamboyant style of life after he became rich, and also his political aspirations. He was a write-in candidate for governor of Kansas and supported many Democratic politicians, most likely because Democrats were in power, while also supporting, quietly, the American Fascist movement.
Brinkley had devoted supporters and ardent detractors, one of his foremost opponents being the redoubtable Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association, and it was Brinkley's ruinous decision to sue Fishbein for libel that brought about his ultimate fall.
Comments
Copyright 2004 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln