Footnote #: 054
Refers to Image: [interjection at this point in the story]
Time: 00:07:54
Truth Value: Omission
The fact is that Brinkley’s miracle procedure wasn’t just one, static procedure, as we present it in the film; he changed what he was doing (or claimed to be doing) quite a lot over the years. It would take far more than a few footnotes to explain this…
Sometimes he sliced up the goat balls and put a thin layer under the skin; sometimes he put the goat balls in the lower intestine; sometimes he said they were true transplantations (as in, they “lived on” in the human body); sometimes he said he’d never said that, and on and on. He was “experimenting as he went along,” to be generous. We suspect that after a while, Brinkley probably just made an incision and sewed it up immediately, having only pretended to put the goat testicle in there. It would have worked just as well. Also, in his advertising he didn’t emphasize impotence at all; impotence, which he usually euphemized as “sexual weakness” or “childless homes,” was just one of the many diseases and ailments he claimed to be able to cure with the goat glands, ranging from insanity to sluggish temperaments to diabetes to hardening of the arteries.
We’re simplifying here to keep things tidy, and because at this point in the story we don’t want to let on that Brinkley’s cure was sold as a miracle cure-all (that makes it a little too obvious that it was fraudulent).