Foiling a fake (book excerpt: Charlatan)

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Down to his last few dollars, he spotted a newspaper ad: Milford, Kansas, population two thousand, was looking for a doctor. He and Minnie loaded up their flivver and arrived there on October 7, 1917. On the edge of town Brinkley stopped, and the car shivered into silence. Milford had lied to them. Its population wasn't two thousand; it was two hundred, if it stood on a chair.

Located ninety-five miles north of Wichita and ten miles from the exact geographical center of the nation, Milford was about as close as you could get to the navel of the United States, and about as interesting to contemplate. In 1859 traveler Horace Greeley wrote that the buffalo moved quickly through the area, "as I should urgently advise them to do." Since then the town had grown to a length of two blocks. Its lone attempt at grandeur, a large building misguidedly salvaged from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, stood empty and derelict. The train station was in a cornfield.

Minnie took one look at Milford and burst into tears.

But they had no choice, so they rolled up their sleeves. The Brinkleys rented two rooms, opened an office in front, and put their iron bed in the back. They added a small drugstore. And in the weeks that followed they began to make a name for themselves. Brinkley traveled miles to make house calls, even after the snows hit, and Minnie hired out as a midwife. Even so, they were barely getting by.

Then one day a forty-six-year-old farmer, Bill Stittsworth, appeared at their door, big featured, unshaven, in a crumpled hat. His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation, any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel. At least at first.

"There's something wrong with me," Stittsworth said when he'd taken a seat, "though to look at me you wouldn't judge it. I do look husky, don't I?"

Brinkley nodded and stroked his goatee, a habitual tic.

"I'm all in," the patient ventured. "No pep. I'm a flat tire."

Finally he spelled it out.

Dr. Brinkley (perhaps mindful he could be staying there a while) replied that over the years he had tried "serums, medicines and electricity," but nothing worked on that condition. There was no cure.

A pause as they gazed out the window.

"Too bad I don't have billy-goat nuts," the farmer remarked, pondering the livestock.

Exactly what happened next is in dispute. According to the book Life of a Man by Clement Wood, a self-promotional fantasia commissioned by Brinkley in the 1930s: "The doctor half 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 conduct, especially with relation to healing, except the utterly honest and straightforward."

The farmer pleaded and threatened. Brinkley demurred. What if something went wrong? But the patient wouldn't take no for an answer, and finally the doctor agreed to try.

That was his version. Stittsworth's family later contended that it was Brinkley who offered the farmer money, and then more money, hundreds of dollars, to submit to the experiment. However it happened, from Brinkley's point of view it was his ticket to the top -- if it worked. He had always known that for an operator with big dreams the percentage of people with cancer, for example, is discouragingly small; but a working driveshaft is as fundamental as sunshine. What better place to hang out one's shingle?

Neither man wanted publicity, at least not yet, so two nights later while Milford slept, Stittsworth slipped back to the clinic. He stripped and climbed onto the operating table. Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic ...

It was over in less than fifteen minutes. One of them paid the other and the farmer went home.

Days passed. The doctor's heart was a battleground of avarice and fear. Then, after two long weeks, the farmer reappeared with a smile on his face.

Now the goat was out of the bag. Stittsworth spread the word, and another farmer, age thirty-eight, tried it. Success! Other locals trickled in, like Charlie Tassine from the barbershop. Then Mrs. Stittsworth insisted on a matching set of goat ovaries.

"Dimly," wrote Clement Wood, "[Brinkley] had begun to realize that he was gifted beyond the run of doctors"--and that a man so blessed could not be bound by the "jealous sheep ethics" of the American Medical Association.

Some weeks later, Brinkley went to Chicago for a brush-up surgery course taught by Morris Fishbein's former professor, Dr. Max Thorek. Brinkley failed the class, as the teacher later explained, due to "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.' "

~~~

This second excerpt examines the trial from Brinkley's lawsuit against Morris Fishbein, MD, the JAMA editor who called Brinkley a charlatan.

When late in the week Morris Fishbein took the stand in his own defense, he was a hyperactive model of serenity and reason. He had not been in the witness chair more than five minutes before Judge McMillan admonished him for talking too fast, even while he pitched himself (with some success) as a messenger of truth above the fray.

Questioned by [Dr. Fishbein's lead attorney, Clinton Giddings] Brown, he sketched the august history of the AMA and his own credentials as a quack buster. Then he was asked how he felt about Brinkley.

"My feelings would be, from a scientific point of view, quite negative," Fishbein said blandly, though he harbored no "personal animosity." A vendetta? That was absurd. Rather, one might view his campaign against "Mr. Brinkley" as a sort of surgical procedure, "like dissecting away a malignant tumor from a normal body, and off the body of science." He glanced at the tumor himself seated across the way.

Then Brown took Fishbein through his inflammatory magazine article point by point, identifying sources for his allegations and justifying his choice of words ("the apotheosis of quackery"). Some of his statements, Fishbein said, were based on the "admitted biography" of Brinkley, Clement Wood's notorious Life of a Man. Some came from material collected by Arthur Cramp at the Bureau of Investigation, some from published interviews with victimized patients, some from listening to him on the radio. Fishbein explained yet again how Brinkley displayed the classic hallmarks of a quack: the impossible promises, the "trade secrets," the long list of fake degrees.

Real doctors share real discoveries because they want to help people, he said, whereas Brinkley's so-called discoveries have "never been published in any medical periodical nor ... submitted to the criticism of the medical profession," and for good reason. His vaunted Formula 1020 would have stood revealed as nothing more than plain water with "an infinitesimal, a very tiny amount of coloring matter," so small the AMA lab had to bring in a microchemist to figure out what it was.

And what was it?

"Approximately one drop of indigo to 100,000 parts of water -- about what you would get by throwing a bottle of bluing into Lake Michigan." Each ampule had cost about eighteen cents to manufacture; Brinkley sent each of his prostate patients home with a half dozen, for which he charged one hundred dollars -- a markup of more than 9,200 percent. And this was just one example! The recklessness of Medical Question Box, the comedy and tragedy of goat glands, all of Brinkley's vulpine machinations for more than twenty years had been directed toward a single goal: self-aggrandizement, financial, egoistic, any kind you cared to name. He himself, Fishbein said, because of his unique position at the AMA, was personally acquainted with more than ten thousand physicians in America, and he had never known one of them to have a gross income in excess of a million dollars, the amount Brinkley admitted taking in during 1937. "That's not medical practice," the editor concluded. "That's big business."

All right, said Brown, but how could he be so sure that Brinkley's rejuvenation techniques were worthless? Well-respected men, both in Europe and the United States, had been claiming success with similar methods for many years.

With a settled sigh Fishbein faced the jury. Reversing the natural aging process, he said, was no more possible than restoring "the elasticity in a pair of suspenders." Rejuvenation was a snare and a delusion from which the public, he prayed, was at long last beginning to awake.