Читать книгу Don't Fall For It - Carlson Ben, Ben Carlson - Страница 8

Each morning the two “doctors” would ask the patients who answered the ad different questions, take some notes, collect $25 – a massive sum at the time – and inject colored water into their posteriors. They called the treatment electric medicine and claimed it came from Germany. The two men skipped town a few months later to avoid those who figured out their scam. After running out of money, Brinkley found a newspaper ad looking for a doctor in Kansas, in a town called Milford with a population of just 200 people. So he and his wife Minnie moved to Milford to open up a doctor’s office and drugstore.^[10]

The couple were barely making ends meet when a 46-year-old farmer named Bill Stittsworth came into their office. Stittsworth said he and his wife had been unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant for 16 years. “I’m a flat tire,” he told the Brinkleys. Then Stittsworth looked out the window at a nearby farm and observed, “Too bad I don’t have billy goat nuts.” You see, billy goats are known to be some of the healthiest, most fertile animals on the planet. The farmer knew firsthand a goat’s appetite for sex was famous.^[11]

No one really knows exactly what happened next. Brinkley claims the farmer begged him to try an experimental procedure using goat glands. The farmer’s family claims Brinkley paid Stittsworth to experiment on him. Regardless of whose idea it was, a few nights later both men were back in the office prepping for a unique surgical procedure. Brinkley slit the farmer’s scrotum, after which he reached for two goat testicles that were sitting on a small silver tray, implanted a goat testis on each side of the scrotum, and sutured them to the loose tissue. Stittsworth had his man parts sewn up and the whole ordeal was over in 15 minutes.^[12]

Two weeks later the farmer showed up and told Brinkley the good news – his wife was finally pregnant! They named their child Billy, after a goat, of course. The second couple who conceived a child after having the goat gland surgery named their child Charles Darwin Mellinger, in honor of science of all things. Brinkley unwittingly stumbled onto a genius marketing campaign for the rural population in a small Kansas town. The goat gland surgery became an instant hit. His operation became so personalized he would even let the patients select their own goat from his backyard. Brinkley was averaging 50 procedures a month in no time, at $750 a pop (a lot of money for the 1920s and around $9,000 in today’s dollars). Eventually he began implanting goat ovaries in women as well, to double his clientele.^[13]

Spoiler alert: Implanting goat testicles into men’s scrotums is not a scientifically backed procedure. Most people didn’t stop to think about how insane this was at the time because they were desperate. A few weeks after his first goat gland transplant, Brinkley told a classroom full of other doctors, “I have a scheme up my sleeve and the whole world will hear of it.” The way he was going to get the whole world to hear about his plan was through a brand-new technology that would take his operation to the next level.