‘Goat Gland King’ conned impotent men across the US. He was born 136 years ago in NC

Before he was the “Goat Gland King,” John Romulus Brinkley was just a boy from rural North Carolina.

Brinkley, who amassed a few questionable degrees but never finished medical school, is best known for a quack procedure he popularized in the 1920s and ‘30s that involved transplanting the sex glands of goats into impotent men, according to historical record.

He was born on July 8, 1885 in Beta, North Carolina, an unincorporated community in Jackson County just off U.S. 74. The closest town was Sylva, where just 281 people lived in 1900.

Today would have been his 136th birthday.

Brinkley married twice and lived in at least seven other states during his lifetime. He amassed most of his wealth and notoriety working as a doctor in Kansas, where he also built one of the state’s first radio stations, KFKB, as a powerful advertising platform for his “treatments.”

According to NCPedia, a resource for historical research managed by the North Carolina Government & Heritage Library, Brinkley was the illegitimate son of a doctor and his wife’s niece, both of whom died when he was young.

Brinkley worked as a telegraph operator in North Carolina until 1908, according to the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

‘Are you a manly man?’

Brinkley married a local woman before they decamped for Chicago, where he enrolled in medical school but later dropped out, NCpedia said. In the years that followed, Brinkley reportedly “began to identify himself as a doctor.”

The couple divorced while living in Tennessee, and Brinkley later married the daughter of a Memphis doctor, according to NCpedia.

He opened his first medical practice in Greenville, South Carolina, then moved to Arkansas and eventually Kansas City, where he got a degree from the Eclectic Medical University that took one year to complete and cost him $100, according to NCPedia.

The N.C. DNCR called it today’s equivalent of a diploma mill.

With his degree, Brinkley was permitted to practice eclectic medicine — a type of alternative medicine that became popular in the 19th Century, according to the Center for Inquiry. It was built on earlier traditions of herbal medicine and relied on such practices as hypnosis and homeopathy.

Brinkley was able to practice in Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas with his degree, NCPedia said.

It wasn’t until he set up shop in Milford, Kansas, in 1916 that Brinkley’s career as a goat transplant surgeon took off, according to the Kansas Historical Society. The operation involved removing the sex glands of a young goat and putting them in a man, “thereby restoring sexual vitality and fertility to impotent or ‘tired’ men,” according to NCPedia.

The surgery cost $750 up front, or about $13,000 in today’s dollars, and his advertisements included phrases like, “Are you a manly man full of vigor?” WNC Magazine reported.

One of Brinkley’s first patients was reportedly a farmer whose wife got pregnant after his surgery. They named their son “Billy,” according to The Wichita Eagle.

Brinkley subsequently opened radio station KFKB, which he used to advertise his many medicinal treatments and to diagnose people on air, according to the Kansas Historical Society.

His fraudulent degree was reportedly uncovered in the early 1920s, but Brinkley held fast to his “loyal following.”

According to the N.C. DNCR, Brinkley was worth $12 million at the height of his success. He came to be known as the “Kansas Ponce de Leon” and the “Goat Gland King.”

Maintaining his NC ties

Brinkley’s empire began to crumble in 1930, when the Kansas Medical Board revoked his license and the Federal Radio Commission closed his station, according to the Kansas Historical Society.

He ran a few unsuccessful write-in campaigns for governor before eventually moving to Del Rio, Texas, where he built the radio station XERA across the border in Mexico to continue touting his quack treatments.

WNC Magazine reported the new radio station put Brinkley “back on top” — if only for a moment.

Brinkley used his radio connections to broadcast “lesser-known talents” from his home county of Jackson, according to the magazine, even returning to buy a summer house in East LaPorte near where he grew up. There are two walls of river stones that still bear his name — “Dr. John R. Brinkley” — at the entrance to his old property today.

Brinkley also reportedly purchased several thousand acres of mountain land in Jackson County that went to his son after his death.

In 1938, Brinkley was denounced as a “medical charlatan” by the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, according to NCPedia. He sued the editor for libel and lost, sparking accusations of medical malpractice as well as charges of tax evasion and mail fraud that ultimately resulted in his bankruptcy in 1941.

He died at age 56 on May 26, 1942 in San Antonio, Texas, following “three heart attacks and the amputation of a leg,” according to the Kansas Historical Society.

Brinkley was buried in Memphis, Tennessee, NCPedia said. A historical marker now sits across the river from his boyhood home in North Carolina.

The story of Brinkley’s bizarre fame was made into a documentary called “Nuts!” in 2016. There was also, for a time, talk that Robert Downey Jr. would play Brinkley in a full-length feature film.

The movie is still in production, according to IMDB.

‘Titanic of its time’ sunk off NC coast 183 years ago. Did two survivors get engaged?

How NC pried its long-lost Bill of Rights from ‘Antiques Roadshow’ dealer 18 years ago

Rejected at birth, exploited as kids: Famous conjoined twins died 52 years ago in NC