Monkey Glands

[Steve Hicks]

"Goat glands" I can attest to.

In the 1920s and '30's, one Dr. John
Brinkley had a clinic here in Kansas
where he did thousands of goat-gland
transplants for men having virility prob-
lems.  He also owned a local radio-
station that broadcast his claims to
a wide audience.

As the A.M.A., federal health agencies
and others began to nip at his heels, Dr.
Brinkley ran for governor, and nearly won,
taking the stump in those early years of
the New Deal as a populist hero, the bene-
factor of suffering mankind who was being
persecuted by the bureaucrats.  There's
some evidence "Goat-Gland" Brinkley did
win that election, but was snookered out
of the office through vote-fraud by a strong
state Republican party.  (The Republican who
beat Brinkley, Alf Landon, became his party's
presidential nominee in 1936.)

       Dr. Brinkley eventually found it advisable
to move his operations from Kansas, indeed,
from the United States altogether.  He located
his clinic in Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila; directly
across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas,
and continued to perform goat-gland transplants
there for the rest of his life.

       Beyond the reach of the A.M.A. and federal
health agencies, Brinkley was also beyond the
control of U.S. broadcast laws, and built one of
the largest transmitters possible, to blast his mes-
sage of hope to sexually-dysfunctional men in the
U.S. midwest, southwest, mountain states and south-
east.  The station, XERA,  was still there when I was
a kid in the '50s and '60s, and still broadcasting with
greater-than-legal-in-the-U.S. wattage: Dr. Brinkley was
long gone, however, and Wolfman Jack was playing
rock 'n' roll (which, in many ways, may have had the
same effect as Dr. Brinkley's operation).


                                               Regards,  Steve Hicks

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