Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

"This one is about a really intriguing character. The reason I included it is that people since Aristotle’s time have been saying ‘take my pill, use my potion, and you can live forever’ or ‘you can stay young forever.’ Those people are still with us. I’d say that once a week in my local newspaper, there’s a half-page advertisement on some crazy stuff that’s supposed to keep you young and healthy forever. These people are quacks. They’re quacks that walk the edge of legality. But this book is about probably the most intriguing quack of them all, John R. Brinkley. He convinced people in the 1920s and 1930s that the way to preserve their sexual vigour was by transplanting goat testicles into men and goat ovaries into women. He had a remarkable piece of good luck, which was that the wife of one of the first men that he did this on had a baby within a year. He attributed this to the goat transplant, although now we know that the body must have immediately destroyed whatever he put in there because it saw it as foreign material. What made him so interesting is that he was so compelling. He got fabulously rich during the Depression by doing this. But he was an out-and-out quack. He killed dozens of people. Eventually, he was brought down. He was penniless by the time he died because he got sued for wrongful death by individuals whose parents or spouses had gone to him perfectly healthy, to get their goat testicle transplant, and then died a few days later. It turned out he wasn’t even a legitimate doctor, he had gotten a diploma from one of these diploma mills. But he was a marketing genius. He basically invented talk radio. In the 1930s he started his own station, with a medical call-in service where most of what he said people should do, after diagnosing them over the phone, was take his pills. He had this string of pharmacies that sold his pills. It turned out his pills were full of coloured water. Eventually, he was brought down when Morris Fishbein, who was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association , wrote an article calling him ‘the most successful quack.’ Brinkley sued Fishbein for slander. It was that lawsuit that got him into court. It became widely known that he was a quack and that was really his downfall. He lost his medical license in Kansas, which is where he practiced for a long time. Then he lost his broadcast license, so he moved to Del Rio, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border, and started a high-wattage Mexican radio station. It was so high-wattage station that it was receivable in every state in the United States and in 15 countries. People said that if you had fillings in your teeth, and you lived in Del Rio, Texas, you could probably pick up his radio station on your teeth. After he lost his medical license in Kansas, he got mad and decided he was going to run for governor. He made barnstorming public speeches. He would show up in an airplane in small towns and gave speeches from the airport, with all the people there. He came within a whisker of becoming the governor of Kansas. He probably would have done it if the election hadn’t been purposely rigged by the Democratic Party. At that time, he probably would have been the governor of Kansas, which shows that things haven’t changed so much since the 1930s. He started off with sexual potency but then he started adding more and more things. Eventually, it was ‘live longer,’ ‘cure arthritis, tooth decay…’ pretty much everything. Late in his career, he started doing vasectomies, or the opposite of the goat transplant. He first started out during the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 500,000 Americans. That was the worst epidemic we’d ever had before COVID. He visited all the patients and did remarkably well. The local townspeople raved about what a wonderful doctor he was, even though he didn’t really have a medical degree. Apparently, he was very kind and reassuring. He’s just a really fascinating character. He built the biggest mansion in Del Rio, Texas, during the 1930s when he was making all this money and I visited it a few years ago. I guess if you were a scoundrel long enough ago, you eventually just become a colourful figure. His mansion is now a Texas historical landmark and on a plaque there it says that he ‘engaged in controversial medical practices.’ That’s like saying a famous bank robber like John Dillinger engaged in ‘controversial banking practices.’ The book is so wittily written. It’s one of the few books that you will chuckle at repeatedly as you are reading it. But what it really shows is how desperate people are to live longer, to stay healthy longer and that they will believe anything. Even in the 1930s, believing that a transplantation of goat testicles into your own scrotum would make you live longer just seems crazy. This is my second book on aging. My first book was published 25 years ago. What this one does is march through the animal kingdom, describing the species that have exceptional longevity. The point of doing this is, first of all, to show people that there are certain patterns in nature. Some animals live an exceptionally long time, and stay healthy for a long time. But I also wanted to point out that current medical studies tend to focus on aging only by studying animals that are abysmal failures at it. Humans are not like that; we’re quite successful. If you look at our longevity, and the length of our healthy lives compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we’re remarkably long-lived. The point of this book is to show that nature is smarter than we are and that if we really want to be able to change the length of human health and the length of human life dramatically, we need to look at the animals that are more successful than we are, rather than looking at the animals that are slightly less than abysmal failures, which is basically the way that the medical establishment is approaching it now. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I give some examples of how we might go about this. For instance, the longest-lived mammal is a bowhead whale, which probably lives 250 years. It’s hard to have a laboratory colony of bowhead whales, but there’s a lot we can learn from looking into the cells of a bowhead whale. If you have that many cells, 100,000 times as many cells as humans do, and you don’t get cancer in a year—each cell potentially could turn into a cancer—you must have some very, very good mechanisms for preventing cancer. The same goes for other aspects of longevity. Then there are animals, like bats and birds, that could be studied in the laboratory. A good example that I like is that a mouse, which we can study in the laboratory, will live three or four months on average in the wild, and the longest-lived ones ever probably live a year, maybe a few months longer than a year. But the house sparrow, the most common bird in the world, can live up to 20 years in the wild. It does this despite having levels of sugar in the blood that would make it a diabetic were it a human, and a body temperature that would count as a dangerous fever. All these things should make it shorter-lived according to a lot of the ways we tend to think about longevity at the moment. But, in fact, it lives 20 times longer than a mouse. Those are the kinds of animals that we should be studying. I call them ‘exceptionally long-lived animals.’ Methuselah’s Zoo makes the case that those are the animals that really hold the secrets to longer, healthier human lives."