It took balls - goat balls to be exact. | Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued...

Best Book Since 'Shadow Divers" | Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam | Pope Brock

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	• Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam Pope Brock Crown, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hilarious and scary

Lively and colorful writing, and what a story. Here's a guy who waved the populist banner, made out that the government and the AMA were conspiring to destroy him, and got away with quackery and--in some cases--murder and mayhem for years. And it didn't happen all that long ago. The lucky ones among his "patients" merely got their pockets picked. Fascinating, and not just as a period piece; we all know there are still Dr. Brinkleys out there today.

It took balls - goat balls to be exact.

Great fun. Highly informative. Terrific read. Although the story is set in the early part of the 20th century, it's relevant today - shockingly and amusingly so. People haven't changed. The scams haven't changed much either. Where there is a buck to made off the plight of some poor soul, there is always a line to fleece them. Dr. Brinkley was at the front of the line for almost 20 years, not only fleecing, but often butchering or killing his patients in the process. Dr. Fishbein, a man on a mission, to stop Brinkley from practicing, pursued him for decades. He finally had his day in court. Along the way, Brinkley's innovations in radio, marketing and political campaigning, are going strong today. A truly wonderful book.

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Best Book Since 'Shadow Divers"

Very timely and funny. I read it in one sitting. Could not put it down.

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Making the world safe for Viagra

John R. Brinkley is the man of the title, who was one of a handful of pseudo-scientists and medical hucksters who laid the groundwork for Viagra and its competitors by experimenting with methods to improve male potency. Operating in the 1920s through the 1940s in small towns like Greenville, South Carolina, Mitford, Kansas and Del Rio, Texas, Brinkley was basically a small-time hustler who stumbled on sexual dysfunction as fertile ground for his talents.

So he began operating on the fringes of medicine, with a small smattering of training and dubious degrees from what we would now call "alternative" sources (alternative to the now much stronger American Medical Association, which derived much of its current cache and strength from battles with Brinkley and his compatriots on the fringe). Among other methods, he implanted goat testicles! Fringe medicine, indeed; without specific numbers (the true totals are probably unknown), Brock cites Brinkley as one of if not the most prolific of American serial killers based on the death rate from untested and insane techniques like these.

Pressed by the AMA, Brinkley expanded into mass marketing, politics, franchising of pharmaceuticals (at least one of which was found to be pure water with a tiny amount of coloring) and the fledgling field of radio. Brinkley's downfall, as Brock describes in a rather abrupt coda, came at the hands of a civil court when he sued Morris Fishbein, the AMA's head huckster hunter, for libel, and lost, finally (for the unsuspecting public) and disastrously (for him) exposing himself as the fraud the AMA claimed.

While the book was an enjoyable and easy-to-read introduction to this bizarre character (proof, yet again, of the truth-stranger-than-fiction axiom), I am only giving the book three stars for these two reasons: First, while a few primary sources are cited in the bibliography, the notes rely most heavily on a small handful of secondary sources, which makes me wonder if these earlier secondary sources may tell a more complete picture of the era. Two of the secondary sources cited:

The roguish world of Doctor Brinkley
The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Southern History

And secondly, while the truth indeed is strange here, Brock sometimes seems afraid to let the story tell itself, and tries too hard to pump it up with purple prose and overdone dramatics.

Enjoy Brock's book, but if you are really interested in mining the details of Brinkley and his era, use the bibliography and notes as a reading list for digging deeper.

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Things haven't really changed all that much, have they?

I got this book after seeing the author on C-SPAN II's "About Books", and as an amateur medical historian, decided to purchase it when the library didn't have it. It seems that all the factors came together to make John Brinkley a rich and famous (and later broken) man, and that he introduced the Western Hemisphere to some fabulous music didn't hurt his cause either.

I was completely surprised to read that the respected surgeon Max Thorek, who now has a hospital in Chicago named after him, was a participant in this scam! But unlike Brinkley, he knew what he was doing, surgically, and abandoned this project when it proved worse than useless.

His wife's story appears to be at least as interesting as his, too.

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In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley?America?s most brazen young con man?arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.

It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned ?Dr.? Brinkley into America?s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country?s ?most daring and dangerous? charlatan out of business.

Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and ?30s, but despite Fishbein?s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world?s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ?n? roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.

Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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