Often, we buy into alternative medical treatments because we want them to be true. They offer to heal something medicine can’t, and they give us false hope.
Even knowing that, I’m not sure how some jackass sold us on “I’ll sew goat balls into you, it’ll give you a wicked boner.”
Today’s Moment of Science… The Goat Nad Guy.
The modern medical school started to gel into something you’d recognize about a hundred years ago, but snake oil is literally as old as the railroads. For about a century, the field of eclectic medicine briefly blinked into and out of existence. Based on the study of botanical and herbal treatments, it promised individualized care for patients. To be fair, when eclectic medicine got its start in 1833, we still really sucked at medicine.
Born in 1885, John Romulus Brinkley wanted to be a doctor so badly, he’d do anything except actually graduate from medical school. He went to three years at an eclectic medical college run as a for-profit institute that was reported to suffer from inadequate clinical training. He dropped out after three years, and the school refused to release his academic records due to non-payment of tuition. Which is about where my sympathy for him begins and ends.
He “completed” his degree in 1913 by purchasing it for $100 from what was, by all reports, a diploma mill. Brinkley was now allowed to practice medicine on real live humans in eight states. He practiced in quite a few of them over the years while running from a long trail of charges including fraud, unpaid checks, bigamy, and killing his patients.
So, goat testicles.
In 1917, Brinkley set up shop in Milford, Kansas. The town fucking loved him. His clinic paid well, he did house calls, and he was lauded as a lifesaver during the Spanish flu pandemic. It speaks to his bedside manner, and to the fact that nobody was all that good at treating the Spanish flu.
As the story goes, a patient named Bill Stittsworth asked for something that could help with his “sexual weakness.” Which I think was 1920s speak for “raging boner medicine, please and thank you.” A few stories have floated over the years for why they landed on goat balls. One is that Stittsworth was a goat farmer and it planted a freaky little seed. Another is that Brinkley’s earlier studies in animal physiology gave him the idea that goats were healthy and virile. So.
Whatever the reasons, Brinkley talked Stittsworth into letting him perform the experimental surgery, and there was a stiff breeze blowing for him once again. When Stittsworth’s wife gave birth within a year of the surgery, Brinkley saw a marketing opportunity in the first ‘goat-gland baby.’ He went on to peddle the surgery for $750, which is roughly $10k today.
Likely, the surgery worked as often as it did because of a fun glitch in the placebo effect; expensive placebos “work better” than cheap ones. That and really, how many people just wouldn’t admit they spent $10k for goat ball implants that didn’t work?
To be clear, there’s no reason to believe having a goat’s testicles sewn into you does anything other than potentially introduce a source of infection. Given that Brinkley’s medical training could generously be described as “incomplete,” mistakes were made.
As a result of complications from goat gland implant surgeries, he was sued for wrongful death over a dozen times.
Brinkley’s surgery would make him rich and eventually bring enough exposure to his practice that he was outed as an uncredentialed testicle thief. He died nearly broke in 1942 at the age of 56.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, wondering how quickly Oprah would have given this asshole his own TV show.
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