Footnote #: 003
Refers to Dialogue: “When he stood before the dean of Johns Hopkins”
Time: 00:00:54
Truth Value: Probable Invention
Keywords: Medical Education, Origin Story, Quack Clichés, The Life of a Man
We can’t verify whether this scene at Johns Hopkins actually happened, but it was a constant feature of Brinkley’s origin story. The language being spoken by the narrator is taken almost verbatim from The Life of A Man, a biography commissioned and paid for by Brinkley (more on that book later). In 1902, Brinkley graduated from high school and he would have been 17 years old on July 8, so it’s feasible that he could have decided to try to enroll in medical school at that time. However, the whole scene feels rather improbable to us, and the “I tried to get legitimate medicine to accept me and they cruelly declined” is also a standard quack cliché.
“Enroll” has two “ls”.
fixed!
There is also never any indication of just how a barefoot teenage boy was able to obtain an audience with the dean of admission of a major medical school. Family connections? Unlikely. A really convincing application cover letter? Doubtful. No one saw him sneak into the building during lunch hour where he caught the dean unawares and spilled his story before being dismissed? Sure. Or, maybe, it didn’t actually happen. If it HAD happened, there’d be an explanation of how. There is not, though it fits into his self-constructed storyline of woe nicely.