The things the Narrator says here are insane! Not even Brinkley said it “worked every time.” We’re engaging in some puffery and exaggeration for effect.

We read rumors that Huey Long made an appointment to get goat glands but was assassinated in 1935 before he got them, so we didn’t invent the idea of Long being associated with Brinkley in some way. However, we’ve never seen any reference to his actually having done so, so we’re stretching here to make it seem like Brinkley had some famous patients vouching for him. Why? Because the “celebrity endorsement” is a key trick used by quacks; Brinkley did it, and we’re doing it too. (See also: note 161 on another Huey Long connection.)

Rumors exist that Brinkley was William Jennings Bryan’s wife’s doctor for a time. So, this is another intentional distortion to create a “celebrity endorsement.”

We wanted the name of a famous movie star here, because we heard rumors that Brinkley had operated on some “movie stars” in 1922. We picked Valentino because he was a sex symbol and we thought a contemporary audience might have heard of him.

Brinkley himself said that he “could” cure President Wilson. He never said he did.

To claim that “everyone knew that Buster Keaton was no stranger to the power of goat glands” is pretty sneaky in the context of this sequence of celebrity endorsements. We’ve never read anywhere that Buster Keaton had the procedure or had anything at all to say about it. However, the fact that Keaton included this gag shows how well-known the goat gland cure was by 1922!

We invented these numbers and they are probably highly overstated. Surprisingly, the 1930 census lists Milford’s population as only 300. Our sources suggest uniformly that Milford grew a lot during the 1920s because of Brinkley’s fame and that 1930 should have been close to the height of Milford’s size and prosperity. Perhaps Milford “grew” from just under 200 to about 300? We don’t know, and we spent way too long trying to get Census data for Milford in 1920 before deciding that this was a great example of getting way too picky about a minor detail. (See also: notes 24 and 62 on Milford’s population.)

The rest of this panorama is invented and an exaggerated version of the truth, which is that Brinkley is the reason Milford grew larger. The real photos of Milford from the time aren’t very interesting, plus they all have the radio station in them, and the radio station doesn’t exist yet in our film!

Brinkley’s status as perpetual benefactor to his community is a big part of the image he cultivated, for obvious reasons. There are loads of period newspaper references to how much Brinkley “built up” Milford (“the Milford [Little League baseball] team wears uniforms furnished by Dr. Brinkley” said The Junction City Daily Union in 1922, and “[Brinkley] gave the town a $25,000 Methodist church in memory of his mother” claimd The San Bernardino County Sun in 1933) but they’re all pretty hard to substantiate. He certainly made many improvements to his own property, and spared no expense (“Brinkley built electrical, water and sewage systems for his hospital, and soon his power plant supplied Milford businesses, then the Methodist church, then residences. He expanded the water and sewer systems also, and sidewalks were built,” wrote Lee). And there’s little doubt that Milford benefitted from its new status as rejuvenation destination (“trains stop regularly at Milford and electric lights and asphalt streets have supplanted kerosene lamps and mud roads” said the Wilmington News-Journal in 1923, and “the town is planning a new hotel” said The San Bernardino County Sun in 1923).

But remember that he’s got a paid staff of PR people working for him to place stories just like these in newspapers!

At least one source indicates that KFKB was the fourth “commercial” radio station, but the source that author Lee cites is Shruben, and when we went back to Shruben to fact-check this we didn’t find that claim anywhere in the cited article. So we didn’t make this up, but we also don’t have great substatiation.

In any case, assuming it’s true, we still left out the “commercial” part because (1) it’s overly complicated and we don’t really know what it means; and (2) we’re not emphasizing what a self-serving action this was. We want to keep the focus on “innovator/pioneer” here.

KFKB was maybe not the “most powerful station in the world.” It was certainly one of the most powerful in the United States. We have no idea whether that made it the most, or even one of the most, powerful stations in the world. We don’t think Brinkley claimed that, either, so this is our invention.

It might be an exaggeration to say he was the “first guy,” but he was certainly a key figure in the popularization of country music.

We play up Brinkley’s verified love of flowers, especially roses, whenever we can because it makes him seem like a bit of a romantic.

This is an exaggeration; Brinkley had not claimed anything like 10,000 procedures at this time (or at any point in his career). He was quoted in 1923 as having done 3,000; in 1926, newspapers reported 4,000; and in 1938, the AMA estimated the total number as between 5,000 and 6,000.

His planned expansion was actually budgeted for $100,000, not $1 million. We thought $1 million sounded a lot more impressive.

We borrowed the lines, “Of course gland transplantation is only in an experimental stage – for some people…” from The Life of A Man (254). The point is that this guy is right: gland transplantation was only in an experimental stage, and was soon abandoned as totally ineffective (see note 12 on omitted background on the era of experimental gland transplantation).

While we read that Brinkley “planned” to bring 1,000 satisfied patients to DC in a chartered train, we never read that this actually happened.

Actually, Brinkley did not testify at this hearing. We invented this cool zinger. You know, to make him more cool.

We imagined this encounter. We thought it made him look badass.

We don’t think Brinkley said anything like this; we thought his talking about “income inequality” would make contemporary audiences feel he was ahead of his time. We also made up the 4% statistic. This sentiment and the “every man a king” slogan we borrowed from Huey Long.

Generally, in this scene we are trying to demonstrate how Brinkley drew on populist themes in his campaigning. Brinkley loved to cast himself as a representative of the common man, but his opinion of the New Deal and everything it stood for… varied, depending on who he was talking to. His populism was calculated and strategic, not a bedrock principle.

There was already one “border blaster” station (XED, which began broadcasting on November 9, 1930, with a regular schedule from 6:00 PM to midnight) when Brinkley “somehow” got the idea. Brinkley announced he would open his own in January 1931. We’re leaving that out because we’re continuing to feed the implication that he alone invented all these wonderful ideas.

I don’t know that Brinkley really invented this format, an early version of both infomercials and simple corporate sponsorship, but he was certainly an early adopter/pioneer. Previous to his Border Radio days, he only ran ads for his own hospitals, but during this period realized that companies would pay a lot (he apparently charged $1700 an hour) to advertise products on his powerful station that U.S. stations wouldn’t advertise.

Brinkley probably didn’t himself “invent” this method of recording on transcription discs, but he was an early adopter of the technology and was the first to use it to circumvent the new law. So many transcription discs were produced and discarded by XERA that locals supposedly used them as roofing shingles.

“Thousands” seems like a pretty big stretch! We have no idea how many people he employed, nor how “endless” his charitable contributions were. However, all sources indicate that just as in Milford, Brinkley was indeed responsible for bringing some prosperity to the region, and that he engaged in charitable activities.

Actually, he only gave Del Rio “matching funds” to build a library. Close enough.

“If only they had the wisdom to cooperate with the inspired healer from Milford . . . but the doctors had no more sense than the geese of Rome who could only call out ‘Quack! ‘Quack!,'” is taken directly from The Life of a Man (219).

In this interview, Brock seems to be incorrect; it was Brinkley with only a couple of lawyers, and Fishbein was the one was all lawyered up. The attorneys for the plaintiff were Messrs. William Morriss Sr. & William Morriss Jr. of San Antonio, and Phil Foster of Del Rio. Fishbein was represented by Messrs Loesch, Scofield, Loesch & Burke of Chicago; Brooks, Napier, Brown & Matthews of San Antonio; and Boggess, LaCrosse & Lowrey of Del Rio, Texas.

Brock’s version of the story is better, anyway.