"We want to broadcast sunshine. Give Dr. Brinkley your medical problems. He will tell you the truth even if it makes you mad. I discharge my obligation to society when I urge you to have an examination every six months. Ninety-nine out of 100 won't, but I'm after that hundredth. Before you have your prostate gland removed send 25^ to the Brinkley Hospital for booklets."
The merchants of Del Rio, Tex., chuckled and rubbed their hands together. Kansas politicians shook with apprehension. Quack-baiting Editor Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association's Journal cursed through his teeth. Goat-bearded, goat-gland-grafting Dr. John Richard Brinkley was at it again last week.
Long has Dr. Brinkley been a thorn in the side of the A. M. A. More recently he gave Kansas politicians the scare of their lives. Soon after the War he ap peared in the crossroads village of Milford, Kan. and set himself up as a phy sician after obtaining a license by reciprocity from Arkansas. (His Arkansas license had been granted on the strength of a diploma from the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University, since exposed as a "diploma mill.") Dr. Brinkley built a radio station. KFKB, broadcast jazz music interrupted by lectures on rejuvenation. Soon he had transformed the lectures into a clinic, prescribing medicine by radio to patients whom he had never seen but who had written to him describing their ail ments. The prescriptions were identified by code numbers; patients were told where to purchase the medicines. Kansas drug gists, who had suffered because many Kansas physicians filled their own prescriptions, soon found that Dr. Brinkley's prescriptions paid the rent. His Milford Drug Co. made up the prescriptions.
Dr. Brinkley prospered, Milford boomed. The broadcasting business was augmented by a hospital, where Dr. Brinkley or one of his corps of assistants would transplant goat gonads into senile patients for null per operation. From his station he would advertise his hospital, which grew & grew, soon was using 60 goats a month. Milford got a second-class postoffice as a result of Dr. Brinkley's 3.ooo-letters-a-day mail. The doctor built a $100.000 sanatorium, bought four new automobiles, planned apartment houses and bungalows for employes, a $50.000 "Brinkley Methodist Memorial Church," with chimes and a "Brinkley Memorial Organ" and a tablet that read:
"Erected to God and His Son, Jesus, in appreciation of many blessings conferred upon me: J. R. Brinkley."