(Being a compilation of radio talks given over radio stati...)
Being a compilation of radio talks given over radio station XERA during the fall and winter months of 1937 and 1938
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John Romulus Brinkley was born on July 8, 1885 in Jackson County, North Carolina, between the Blue Ridge mountains and the Great Smokies, the only child of John Richard Brinkley, a country physician, and his fifth wife, Candace (Burnett) Brinkley. He was originally named John Romulus, but on the occasion of his Methodist baptism, or later, his middle name was changed to Richard.
Orphaned at the age of ten, Brinkley was reared by an aunt and had a haphazard elementary school education.
During his first marriage, Brinkley seems to have led a nomadic life that took him to various Southern towns as a railroad telegraph operator and then to Chicago, where he attended Bennett Medical College, an eclectic institution, but did not complete the course.
Between 1913 and 1916 Brinkley practiced medicine in Arkansas on an "undergraduate license" and acquired (1915) a diploma from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, a school which figured prominently in the diploma-mill scandals of 1922. He later obtained a fraudulent certificate from the National University of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis, as well as a diploma in medicine and surgery from the Royal University of Pavia in Italy.
Admitted to practice in Arkansas, Brinkley, through reciprocal arrangements then in effect, obtained licensure in several other states, including Kansas, where he settled in the hamlet of Milford. There, in 1917, he began to transplant the gonads of goats into aging farmers. His operation, which promised sexual rejuvenation, was so successful, at least financially, that he was soon able to build a hospital, and his fees soared to $750, $1, 000, and $1, 500.
About 1922 Brinkley went to Los Angeles to operate on Harry Chandler, a prominent real estate developer and publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Impressed by Chandler's new radio station, KHJ, and with a substantial fee in his pocket, Brinkley returned home and in 1923 founded KFKB, the first radio station in Kansas.
A pioneer in the use of radio advertising, he gave a broadcast talk every night except Sunday on glandular troubles and "male weakness, " and conducted a "medical question-box" series, through which he diagnosed the ailments of his listeners and developed a thriving mail-order drug business.
Between medical programs, KFKB offered country music, market news, fundamentalist theology, and, as a public service feature, the College of the Air, which offered courses for credit from Kansas State College in Manhattan. In 1930 KFKB was selected in a contest sponsored by Radio Digest as the most popular station in the United States. The station's income ranged from $5, 000 to $7, 000 a week, supplemented by another $5, 000 from an arrangement under which Brinkley sold secret remedies obtainable only from Brinkley-affiliated druggists.
Brinkley bolstered his position by giving free time over KFKB to prominent political figures in the state, but he soon ran into determined opposition from organized medicine. In April 1930 the Kansas Medical Society, spurred on by the American Medical Association and by a series of exposés in the Kansas City Star, filed a complaint charging him with addiction to alcohol, malpractice, and unprofessional conduct.
In June the Federal Radio Commission, in an important decision that established its right to decide on the basis of past program content whether a radio station served the public interest, rejected KFKB's application for renewal of its license.
That September, after extended hearings, the state medical board of Kansas revoked Brinkley's license to practice medicine on the grounds that the transplantation of goat glands into humans was biologically worthless. Seeking to defend his reputation and protect his business interests, Brinkley announced his candidacy for governor of Kansas as an independent.
Although it was too late to have his name printed on the ballot, he conducted a vigorous campaign, promising free schoolbooks, old-age assistance, a just tax structure, free medical clinics, and new roads, and played on religious themes to enhance his image as a messiah.
Drawing support chiefly from central Kansas, an area that previously had been the backbone of the Populist movement, he polled a write-in vote of nearly 30 percent. It was widely conceded that if his name had been on the ballot Brinkley would have won the election. He tried again, though with less success, in 1932 and 1934.
Meanwhile, under an accommodation with the Mexican government, Brinkley had built a powerful transmitter, XER, at Villa Acuña, Coahuila, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. From Milford, or from his hotel room in Del Rio, Brinkley advertised for patients by remote-control radio, while the mighty wave of XER (later XERA) washed over the whole of the United States with enough power left over, as a writer in the Chicago Daily News phrased it, "to light the street lights in Calgary. "
In 1933 Brinkley shifted all of his movable property, including his diamonds and $80, 000 in cash, to Del Rio, where he deemphasized the gland graft and turned his attention to the prostate gland. At Del Rio he continued to prosper, handling somewhere in the neighborhood of 16, 000 patients over the next four and a quarter years and earning between eight and twelve million dollars. Frankly delighting in his material success, he accumulated about a dozen Cadillacs (on one of which the name "Dr. Brinkley" appeared in thirteen places), several oil properties, three large yachts, a Lockheed Electra airplane, a ranch in Texas, a goat farm in Oklahoma, and a 6, 500-acre estate in North Carolina.
He also built a branch hospital for the treatment of rectal diseases, situated in an orange and grapefruit grove in San Juan, Texas. As the 1930's drew to a close, however, Brinkley suffered a series of reverses. These began with two critical articles in Hygeia, a publication of the American Medical Association, written by its editor, Morris Fishbein. With wounded pride, and claiming that his annual income had dropped to "about $810, 000, " Brinkley filed suit for libel, but a jury decided in 1939 that he had been correctly characterized as a quack, and the verdict was sustained on appeal. By that time Brinkley had been forced by a cut-rate competitor in Del Rio, who duplicated his prostate specialty, to relocate in Little Rock, Ark.
He established two hospitals there, but hardly had time to capitalize on them. Plagued by malpractice suits totaling more than a million dollars and a government claim for $200, 000 in back income taxes, Brinkley transferred his assets to others, including his second wife and their son. He then filed a petition in bankruptcy at Del Rio, subject, however, to the generous exemptions allowed under the Texas constitution.
Finally, in the spring of 1941, Mexico, pressed by the United States to reallocate the wavelength assignments under the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement of 1937, closed down XERA, and the voice of the radio physician was stilled forever. Although Brinkley successfully salvaged a large part of his fortune, his career in medicine had come to an end.
Following the emergency amputation of a leg because of a blood clot, Brinkley died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1942, of heart disease and complications arising from the amputation. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee.
John Brinkley built radio station KFKB ("Kansas First, Kansas Best") using a 1 kilowatt transmitter in 1923, considered among the first radio stations in the state of Kansas. In 1931 he had obtained a radio license from the government of Mexico. He proceeded to construct a 75-kilowatt station at 840 kilohertz on the AM dial, radiated by a sky wave antenna held aloft by 300-foot towers. His station was located on the other side of the Rio Grande from Del Rio. Under the call sign of XER, his new "border blaster" could be heard as far north as Canada. Then he turned his career to marketing injections, using a glandular preparation to replace transplantation. He replaced goat gland surgery with a prostate operation for $250 and up. During the almost five years he was in Del Rio, he grossed $12 million by some estimates. Brinkley’s staff performed operations at the old St. Luke’s Hospital at 1924 Schiller Street and offered rehabilitation care at another hospital on Arch Street Pike in a building that later became a Carmelite monastery. Emerging from obscurity with an insatiable yearning for power and place, he made a fortune by mingling a popular interest in the glands of internal secretion with the ancient symbolism of the billy goat and inadvertently became a shaper of broadcasting techniques and the evolution of radio law.
(Being a compilation of radio talks given over radio stati...)
"Dr. Brinkley" was an artist in the manipulation of men, a Kansas Cagliostro, bold and imaginative in pushing his career in irregular medicine. In slightly less than fifty-seven years, Brinkley had achieved wealth, power, and fame. However, the respectability he had wanted more than anything since his childhood days eluded him to the end. Whether he truly believed in the efficacy of his proposed cures is difficult to say, but the overwhelming rejection of those remedies by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the courts of the land should have made that belief untenable.
In appearance he was blond and rotund, with shrewd blue eyes, reddish-brown mustache, neat goatee, and a retreating hairline.
In 1907 or early 1908 Brinkley married Sally Wike, daughter of a local farmer, by whom he had three daughters: Wanda, Maxine, and Beryl. The couple were divorced in 1913, and on August 23 of that year Brinkley married Minnie Telitha Jones of Memphis, Tennessee; they had one child, John Richard.
1892–1980
1883–1979
1859–1891
The government of Mexico issued a license to his partner Ramon D. Bosquez for another station under the new call letters of XERA at 500 kilowatts.
1927–1976
1828–1896
