This drawing is based on a photo of the Homeopathic Medical College of St. Louis taken in the early 1900s. We couldn’t find an image reference for the Eclectic Medical College of Kansas City, so we substituted this one instead. Same time period, different kind of quackery, and anyway this is clearly a “reenactment” scene, so all of this explanation is probably unnecessary? (From here on out, we are not going to comment on every act of “imagination” used in a reenactment scene; this one seemed kind of funny to us because of the inside joke comparing homeopathy to eclectic medicine.)

Funny story. Before they came to Milford, the Brinkleys settled in Fulton, Kansas, where Brinkley was mayor (!?). This tidbit is often dropped into the story by sources as it’s no big deal and requires no further detail or explanation. We don’t know if it’s true.

At least one other popular comedy of the time referenced the goat gland cure: a 1924 Sunshine comedy called “Sad But True.” This film, directed by Slim Summerville and starring Chester Conklin, is apparently lost; we consider this a tragedy of epic proportions.

And the Serge Voronoff’s monkey gland cure was referenced by the Marx Brothers in their first feature film, “The Cocoanuts” (1929). The song, written by Irving Berlin, is called “Monkey Doodle Doo” and is super creepy.

The “Monkey Gland” was a popular cocktail of the era, featuring absinthe! We’ve had it and it is delicious.

Another Hollywood aside: when studios starting injecting “talkie scenes” into otherwise silent films during the period of transition from silent to sound films (1927-1929), these films were called “goat gland films.”

They loved him so much that in 1933, newspapers reported that a “majority of voters” in Milford unsuccessfully petitioned to have the town itself renamed “Brinkley.”

We don’t know where this photo came from or how old he is, but Brinkley looks hot in it, right?

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.

The hearing actually took place in a hotel (the Hotel Kansan).

This is a Gandhi quote, except according to Wikiquote, there is no record of Gandhi saying this. A close variant of the quotation first appears in a 1918 US trade union address by Nicholas Klein. Wikiquote also reports that a very similar quote is often attributed to Arther Schopenhauer in the format, “Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self- evident.” However, there is no record of Schopenhauer saying that either.

Various stories exist about exactly when and how Brinkley came to this decision.

This bizarre 1934 film is a professionally filmed record of a three-month journey aboard the Brinkleys’ yacht (named the “Doctor Brinkley,” of course). It is seventy-five minuts long and culminates with Dr. Brinkley’s 788-pound tuna catch, which broke the Western Hemisphere record held by Zane Grey.

The film also includes a visit to Brinkley’s birthplace in Beta, NC. We loved this film so very much, in part because it contains a reference to the idea of the “fish story,” or “big fish story” – a colloquial term for an outlandish and far-fetched story full of lies… or a story that’s just too good to be true.

These “home movies” were produced sometime in the late 1930s; we don’t have an exact date.

“I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” is of course from “The Wizard of Oz” (1939).

This ad is for a line of products by a charlatan named Rose Dawn who looked a lot like Mae West.

“Border performers were rated by how much mail they could ‘pull.’ Rose Dawn, Brinkley’s personal astrologer, became ‘one of the most successful mail pullers in border radio history.’ Rose would read listeners’ horoscopes, pray for a radio fan, or give lovelorn advice for $1 per service – with no discounted rates for a combination thereof. Rose also offered a book that would make a personality ‘blossom like a flower’ or vials of perfume that would affect one’s own and other people’s behavior in an extraordinary manner, for $1 each. Some wags began referring to [Del Rio] as Dollar Rio. Rose was married to Koran, a missionary for an occult society called the Mayan Order, and the couple was ‘an ethereal sight on the streets of Del Rio as the glided past gawking onlookers in their pink Chrysler trimmed in green with orchid wheels” (Lee, 161).

This yell is called a “Wilhelm Scream.” Dating from 1951, and originally slated as “man getting bit by an alligator, and he screamed,” the Wilhelm Scream was in Warner Brothers’ stock sound library for many years and has been featured in over 300 films since. It is famous!

We think Brinkley brought that iron gate with him from his previous home in Milford. It certainly looks identical.

This map was in at least one edition of Brinkley’s Doctor Book – one of his tried and true methods of junk mail advertising – and shows his customers and fans in the American Midwest how to get to Del Rio from his previous location in Milford.

This radio broadcast was actually phoned in by “remote control” from Brinkley’s yacht.

Note the life-size portrait of Brinkley in naval uniform. For some reason he was named an Admiral in the “Kansas Navy,” and on his yacht he often wore a uniform befitting that honor. The cap and the sleeves of the jacket bear the Kansas State seal!

Look closely and you’ll see that Minnie’s eyes have been scribbled out in blue pen. Weird. We looked into the book Brinkley is reading; it’s Behind the Ballots, a 1938 memoir written by James Farley, an influential New Deal politician. I’m not sure why he’s posing with it, as Brinkley was vehemently opposed to almost everything the New Deal stood for. He liked to pay lip service to the idea of government helping the poor, at least when he was running for governor during the Depression. But Brinkley’s real beliefs, stated over and over, were of the “men need to pull themselves up” variety.

However, Farley was born very poor around the same time as Brinkley, and by the 1930s he had risen to earn the title of “political kingmaker”; perhaps Brinkley simply appreciated the enormous power Farley had gained. Anyway, none of this is important.

This statue is a replica of the iconic “Capitoline Wolf,” depicting future founders of Rome Romulus and Remus suckling at a wolf’s teat. The image was a favorite of Mussolini’s, who liked to cast himself as the founder of “New Rome.” He gave replicas of the Capitoline Wolf to many U.S. cities called “Rome” as a gesture of goodwill c. 1929-1931. We don’t know where Brinkley got his copy from, but Brinkley visited Italy in 1925 (where he received a medical degree from the University of Pavia, later rescinded). He was quite enamoured of Italian culture and especially Mussolini himself.

Incidentally, the Capitoline Wolf was traditionally thought to be an Etruscan work from the 5th century B.C., with the twins added in the 15th century A.D., but recent scholarship and carbon dating have established pretty certainly that the sculpture is from between the 11th and 12th centuries A.D.

Clement Wood was a well-known hack said to “churn out manuscripts nearly on demand” and to write “at the pace of 80,000 words in 30 days” (not the best pace for careful research and fact-checking).

Clement Wood wrote some other biographies-for-hire. Wood’s list of published works is astonishingly diverse and poor in quality. One of his books, Flesh And Other Stories, published in 1929, was the subject of an important obscenity trial. Wood was a one-time lawyer turned teacher turned Greenwich Village hipster who supposedly hosted orgies as a means of satisfying the sexual needs of his beautiful wife Gloria Goddard; he himself was said to be impotent. He is a fascinating person that we did a lot of unnecessary research on, and his Wikipedia page deserves much more attention.