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

By Pope Brock
310 pp. Crown Publishers, 2008 $24.95

Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

“From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, throngs joined the great maypole dance around the human gland,” for glands were believed to be the seat of the fountain of youth. Playing on this belief, one American huckster, who called himself "Doctor Brinkley," billed the implantation of goat glands into aging men as the Viagra of its day. In reality it was a sham that made him millions. Such bizarre surgeries lay at the center of Pope Brock’s book Charlatan, which focuses on Brinkley’s surprising success as quack doctor, one-man radio conglomerate, and almost-governor.

It is a detailed account of Brinkley’s transplantation of a goat gland into the testicle of a patient that initially draws the reader into Brock’s book. Astonishment that such practices occurred so recently and that Americans lined up by the thousands to spend precious Depression-era dollars on such obvious quackery keeps the reader turning pages.

In fact, while the first half of the narrative, detailing the early years of Brinkley and his American Medical Association nemesis Morris Fishbein, lacks tension and drive, Brock manages to engage his reader with a slick writing style that often mimics the snake-oil salesmen he describes, albeit with a tone that winks at the audience so we’re in on the joke.

Brock’s other success is in explaining not only basic human folly, but delving into America’s psyche during the pre- and post-Depression eras. “In the hell of the Depression, a lot of people went where the hope was. All the rejuvenationists got a new lease on life,” he writes.

But close to the mid-point of the book the narrative begins to gain momentum. Brinkley gets his medical license revoked but runs for governor anyway to the glee of thousands and continues his practice because laws weren’t in force to jail him. Brinkley and Fishbein find themselves face-to-face while on vacation. Brinkley uses his craftiness to come up with advertising ideas that will become mainstays of political campaigns, and invents nation-wide radio that begins the careers of such singers as June Carter.

And of course, there is the final showdown between the inventive charlatan and the medical-licensing authority in court, which “marked the boundary line between the unregulated melee that was American medicine going back two or three centuries, and the sober centralization that has defined it since.”

Sex gland operations, lies, and audiotape, Brock offers it up with a wink and a smile.