In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley — America's most brazen young con man — arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.

It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned "Dr." Brinkley into America's richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country's "most daring and dangerous" charlatan out of business.

Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and '30s, but despite Fishbein's efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world's most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock 'n' roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.

Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.

"One day in the fall of 1917, a Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, 46 years of age, showed up at the clinic that had recently been opened in the hamlet of Milford by a medical quack named John R. Brinkley. 'His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation,' Pope Brock writes in this hugely amusing if somewhat sobering book, 'any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel.' Stittsworth reluctantly..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) admitted that he was suffering the condition for which Viagra is now prescribed. As Brinkley tried to dream up a solution, the farmer looked wistfully out the window, 'pondering the livestock,' and said: 'Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts.'

Precisely what happened thereafter 'is in dispute,' but two nights later Stittsworth returned to the clinic, 'climbed onto the operating table,' and awaited Brinkley. 'Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic,' and Brinkley was on his way. Two weeks later Stittsworth 'reappeared with a smile on his face.' As he told other farmers about his good fortune, men — and then women — began to queue up for injections of billy goat magic, with the result that Brinkley soon 'became a pioneer in gland transplants' at exactly the moment when America was ready for them.

Brock says, accurately, that 'there has probably never been a more quack-prone and quack-infested country than the United States,' and the period between the two world wars — the years when Texas Guinan welcomed customers to her New York speakeasy with the gleeful cry, 'Hello, suckers!' — turned out to be a high-water mark of quackery, as the widespread longing for health and eternal youth coincided with the age of science: 'Mankind had found wisdom at last. Science! Technology! These were the new church. Adam was out, apes were in. Rationality ruled. Rationality had made the airplane possible, and instant coffee. Few realized that it also made possible the golden age of quacks.' Brock continues:

'In this dizzy world of wonders anything was possible, and it all conspired to make the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad. One measure of the scientific gullibility of the age is the number of mythical animals that were now positively declared to exist. During this period between the world wars, sightings were reported and searches launched for, among others, the snoligostus, the ogopogo, the Australian bunyip, the whirling wimpus, the rubberado, the rackabore, and the cross-feathered snee. ... Advances in medicine and hygiene had already increased the average lifetime from forty-one years in 1870 to more than fifty-five by the early 1920s. Now the sky was the limit — biblical life spans, some researchers said, could become a reality — all thanks to the homely gonad and the brave new science of endocrinology.'

John R. Brinkley was just the man to seize the day. A farm boy from the North Carolina mountains, he had found his way into quackery by the time he reached his 20s, and though a brief flirtation with 'electric medicine from Germany' — 'injecting colored water into rear ends' — got him into jail in South Carolina in 1913, he just headed west and bounced right back. He had an 'uncanny grasp of psychology, both mass and individual,' and he 'understood that the relationship between a man and a woman is often less fraught than that between man and member.' He was a strange guy, 'a sort of down-home egghead, crisply confident and alert to a thousand details,' who occasionally 'got liquored up' and turned briefly violent, but he could turn on the blarney and the charm as fast as you please.

The people of Milford thought he was the Second Coming. The astonishing success of his clinic, which by 1918 was a 16-room operation called the Brinkley Institute of Health, brought a great wave of prosperity to this dreary little crossroads. He was way ahead of his time, using advertising and radio and anything else he could exploit to spread the word about the magic he could perform. In 1929 he dreamed up something called Medical Question Box, in which listeners to his radio station could send in their health grievances: 'Brinkley would read some of the letters, diagnose each case, and suggest treatment — all on the radio.' He told them what drugs to buy from pharmacists who were in on the scam: 'The pharmacists kicked back one dollar to Brinkley on each jar sold (at about six times normal retail) and kept the rest.'

Of course he had enemies, the most influential and determined of whom was Morris Fishbein. He was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which at the time was far short of the prestige it enjoys today, but it gave him a platform sufficiently visible for him to become 'the great quack buster of his day, and later the hellhound on Brinkley's trail.' The first time word reached him about Brinkley's antics, Fishbein turned his attention to 'the greatest cause of his career: the professional extermination of John Brinkley, M.D.,' but it took him a long time to bring that off, and Brinkley didn't go down without one hell of a fight.

Brinkley was like a Shmoo, the round-bottomed inflatable toy of my youth. Bop it this way or that, it always rolled right back with a big smile on its silly face. You couldn't keep John Brinkley down, at least not for long. In 1922 when he went to Los Angeles, 'the most quack-intensive town in the nation,' he found a 'vast sucker pool' and aimed to cash in on it by building a 36-room hospital at immense expense, but then the California medical board 'found his resume riddled with lies and discrepancies' and denied him a license. Never mind. He simply went back to Milford, telling his wife, 'The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce,' and expanded his operation there. An advertisement said, 'It is modern throughout, private rooms with bath, and the latest and most modern equipment, telephone in every room, private rooms, reading rooms, lounging rooms, large spacious lobby and dining room, modern drug store and barber shop.'

His radio station in Milford, KFKB, was determined by Radio Digest in 1930 to be 'the most popular radio station in the United States.' That same year he lost his medical license, so he decided to run for governor of Kansas as a write-in independent. He almost certainly would have won had not the rules been switched at the last minute, eliminating as many as 50,000 of his votes on specious grounds. Never mind. He bounced right back and went to Mexico, where he set up a radio operation that by 1932 was up to an astonishing 1 million watts, making it 'far and away the most powerful on the planet,' so powerful that 'on clear nights Brinkley reached Alaska, skipped across to Finland, was picked up by ships on the Java Sea. In later years Russian spies reportedly used the station to help them learn English.'

The programming on Brinkley's Mexican station wasn't just pitches for health schemes and the extreme right-wing views to which he had become susceptible. In order to attract and keep listeners, he brought in country and Tex-Mex musicians; among those tuning in were the young Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and others who eventually became famous and influential country musicians themselves. Stations that broadcast into the United States from Mexico were known as 'border busters,' and Brinkley's XERA was the biggest of all, inadvertently leading the way to the 'full-scale cultural upheaval' that country music brought about.

That was a nice side product, but it couldn't distract attention from the mounting numbers of Brinkley's patients who died in or after leaving his clinic. In 1930 the Kansas City Star 'published the names of five people who had expired at Brinkley's hospital since the fall of 1928' — 'His signature was on their death certificates' — and his license was revoked that same year after it was shown that 42 people, 'some of whom weren't ill when they arrived, had died either by his own hand or under his supervision.' His final numbers are unknown, but they are high; 'though perhaps not the worst serial killer in American history, ranked by body count he is at least a finalist for the crown.'

This, needless to say, is where Pope Brock's tale turns dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance. These are aspects of human nature that just don't go away; even today, in the age of supposed medical enlightenment and sophistication, 'rejuvenation is a global bazaar of infomercials and Web addresses, tools and toys for every need.' John R. Brinkley may be long dead (since 1942), but his heirs in quackery continue to flourish.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com."

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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John R. Brinkley's "cure" for impotence killed several men, cut down on the goat population and made him immensely rich. He also was the first to use clear channel radio to advertise and carried that style into a failed run for governor of Kansas. Brock, a journalist, tells the story of Brinkley, his rise and fall. This is also the history of the efforts of Dr. Morris Fishbein, of the newly-founded American Medical Association, to stop Brinkley and the proliferation of quack medical practitioners. This book is intended for a general (rather than academic) audience. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"Told with uproarious brio...heavenly...A book so lively that its wild stories are virtually wall-to-wall." Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Wonderful American social history and lots of fun." Kirkus Reviews

"An incredible story...Brock lights a roman candle and the reader can't help but ooh and ahh." Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times

"You will devour Charlatan. With a vast and wild cast of characters, and filled with issues and topics that resonate through the years and are as close as the nearest computer, Charlatan...deserves to be a bestseller." Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

"An irresistible and wide-ranging slice of cultural history....Charlatan deftly weaves the stories of these two colorful figures...Fascinating." Seattle Times

"An entrancing book...Brock masterfully captures this amazing and amusing history." USA Today

"[This] stunning new nonfiction book chronicles, with a rollicking sense of fun mixed with outrage, the truly unbelievable career of Brinkley." Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Brock captures the shamelessness and adaptability that make Brinkley fascinating." The New Yorker

"Superbly crafted and enthralling." Financial Times

"Brock exploits the outlandishness of Brinkley's escapades to brilliant comic effect." Washington CEO

"Charlatan is a fast, funny and fascinating read that begs to be made into a movie. It's an early contender for most entertaining non-fiction book of the year, and it's hard to imagine what book could come along to take away the prize." John Grooms, Creative Loafing

"A rollicking biography — at turns funny and horrifying, brimming with wit, insight and who-knew facts....Brock's prose is a joy to read, bold and colorful and a little irreverent....Charlatan reads like a novel — but no one could make this stuff up." The Wichita Eagle

"This spellbinding saga of a once-famous medical man who left all too many corpses in his wake is nothing short of spectacular. Impeccably researched, smartly crafted, beautifully written, it's a pure joy to read. And dealing, as it does, with eternal traits of human greed and gullibility, this extraordinary book is timely as well as timeless....A mesmerizing must-read, written by a writer of exquisite talent....One is left with the kind of reaction one has after reading a masterpiece." Heinz Kohler, Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics, Emeritus Amherst College

"Come one, come all, to the fabulous, hilarious world of rheostatic dynamizers, foot-powered breast enlargers, and goat-gland transplants — the surreal province of one John Brinkley, diploma-mill quack and flimflammer extraordinaire. With perfect pitch story-telling and wonderfully stylish prose, Pope Brock gives us a portrait of a master fraud as Brinkley works the ballyhou-stoked pseudo-science of the Twenties and Thirties to take in millions, while dodging ex-patients, the law, and the AMA. A dazzling cast of walk-ons includes Sinclair Lewis, Eugene V. Debs, a hypochondriacal H. L Mencken, Mussolini, and Sigmund Freud, not to mention Nora, the Monkey Turned Woman. Stranger than fiction doesn't really say it. This is a book you won't put down and a story you'll never forget." James R. Gaines, author of For Liberty and Glory: Washington, LaFayette and Their Revolutions

"Shocking and hilarious in equal measure, this is an extraordinary story of greed, gullibility and goat-glands. In chronicling the outrageous career of John R. Brinkley, king of the quack doctors, Pope Brock has also written a cautionary tale for our own times — about celebrity, mass-marketing, media power, political huckstering and the dangerous allure of mumbo-jumbo. As irresistible as Brinkley's snake-oil, and far more invigorating, Charlatan is an instant classic." Francis Wheen, author of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World and The Irresistable Con: The Bizarre Life of a Fraudulent Genius

"A fascinating look at one of America's most dangerous quacks and the advertising and political maneuvering that sustained him. Must reading for everyone who wants to understand the dark side of the marketplace and the vulnerability of its victims." Stephen Barrett, M.D., Head, Quackwatch.org, author of The Health Robbers

"Astonishing....This masterfully told story of the world's most dangerous quack and the medical sleuth who tracked him down is a delight. Brock skilfully mines the narrow fissure between cutting-edge medicine and outrageous quackery while plumbing the depths of human credulity. His punchy, exuberant style is spot-on perfect for this improbable tale of money, murder and menace." Wendy Moore, author of The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery

Charlatan" is a remarkably rich historical narrative that tells the forgotten story of Americas most ingenious con man and one mans decades-long battle to bring him to justice. 8-page b&w photo insert.

Pope Brock is the author of the critically acclaimed Indiana Gothic, the story of his great-grandfather's murder in 1908. Brock has written for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. He lives in upstate New York with his twin daughters, Molly and Hannah.