A ‘Goat Gland’ Brinkley movie! (What took so long?)

“On 1902, a shoeless boy from the Great Smoky Mountains stood before the dean at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine…..His name was John Romulus Brinkley, he was 17 years old, and he wanted to be a doctor. The dean surveyed the boy and cruelly laughed. He said the boy had better run on home to North Carolina [Jackson County], because doctors weren’t made from people like Brinkley….”

— From “The Strange, True Tale of the Old-Timey Goat Testicle-Implanting Governor” by Penny Lane in the Daily Beast (Sept. 16)

Doctors, no — giants of quackery, yes.

You can help director Lane complete her “seductive and entertaining as hell” biopic on Dr. Brinkley —  pithily titled “NUTS!” — by pledging at Kickstarter.

 

Gov. Goat Gland Brinkley — how’s that sound?

Harry McKown has dusted off (careful, Harry, with that detached cover) a surviving ephemeron from Dr. John Brinkley’s medical practice. Here’s one in the collection from his political career.

After losing both his medical and broadcast licenses, Brinkley conducted significant write-in campaigns for governor of Kansas in 1930, ’32 and ’34.  This homemade pinback surrounds his image, snipped from a palm card, with felt petals symbolizing the Sunflower State.

Here also, courtesy of the Kansas Historical Society, are a laugh out loud (excuse me, I meant LOL) campaign piece and two even stranger mementos of his yachting career.

However, Eileen’s efforts to secure Wayne’s release turn out to have been in vain, as Wayne was murdered by Arnold early in the kidnapping. Eileen’s ordeal takes place over the course of a week, while Wayne is only held for a day before he is killed. The time discrepancy is only revealed towards the end of the movie, and until then it seems that Wayne and Eileen’s experiences are occurring simultaneously.