Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flim-Flam
by Pope Brock
Summary
In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen young con man–arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.
Thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business.
Despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics…
Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.
Excerpt
In the period before the First World War, the Reinhardt brothers, Willis and Wallace, owned a thriving chain of anatomical museums: the London Medical Institute, the Paris Medical Institute, the Heidelberg, the Copenhagen, and so forth. Located in Des Moines, Fort Wayne, East St. Louis, and other towns throughout the Midwest, they were devoted to the documentation and cure of “men’s secret diseases.” Most had big display windows facing the street, and what the Reinhardts put in those windows was the talk of the industry. Their most celebrated exhibit, in Minneapolis, was entitled “The Dying Custer.”
He lay like Saint Sebastian, bristling with arrows, in a lavish three-dimensional tableau. Redskins, corpses, and plaster vultures added richness to the scene, but what kept passersby bunched at the window, staring in for minutes on end, was the slow, rhythmic heaving of Custer’s chest. They gazed till their own breathing fell into sync--it was irresistible--and that gave the Reinhardts’ message time to go to work. True, Custer’s connection to impotence may have been largely metaphorical, but to a certain fretful portion of the populace it struck home. Power gone, youth destroyed--but not yet, not quite yet. Inside this building there was even hope for Yellow Hair.
Mixing terror and hope was the Reinhardts’ stock-in-trade. Their window in Gary, Indiana--again designed by their visionary house artist, Monsieur Brouillard--featured a diorama of a doctor and nurse trying to save a syphilitic baby with the help of a wheezing resuscitator. But displays alone, no matter how artful, didn’t make the Reinhardt twins tops in their field. From their headquarters at the Vienna Medical Institute in Chicago, where they rode herd on some three dozen franchises, they enforced levels of standardization and quality control remarkably ahead of their time. Starting with their training of salesmen: nobody worked for the Reinhardts without first graduating from the “instantaneous medical college” at the home office. This was followed by more training at the Gary branch, where each recruit was given a white coat, asked to grow a Vandyke, and made to practice his patter as if it were Gilbert and Sullivan. Only then were real customers released upon them. Serving as exhibition guides, the floor men were expected to nail twenty percent of all prospects--eight out of an average forty walk-ins a day--or look for another job. The manager of each institute sent headquarters a daily financial report in triplicate.
Admission was free at all these places. The abba-dabba juice was not. Bottles of it were on sale at the exit, a fabled elixir guaranteed to soothe, stimulate, inflate, reinstate, backdate, laminate, and in general make “the withered bough quicken and grow green again,” while at the same time curing and/or preventing the clap; it adapted to the needs of the customer. What was in it? What was in any of them? What was in Dr. Raphael’s Cordial Invigorant, America’s first big virility tonic in the 1850s, whose royal Arabian formula was made vastly more potent by the “magical influence of modern Astrologers”? What was the recipe for Baume de Vie, Elixir Renovans, the Syrop Vitae of Anthony Bellou, the Glorious Spagyric of Jone Case, or any of the others in lands and ages stretching back to the dawn of time?
Excerpted from Charlatan by Pope Brock. Copyright © 2008 by Pope Brock. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
Reviews
“Told with uproarious brio…heavenly…A book so lively that its wild stories are virtually wall to wall”—Janet Maslin, New York Times
“You will devour Pope Brock’s tale of fools and fanatics. Charlatan deserves to be a best seller”—Chicago Tribune
“Hugely amusing [but also] dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
Author's Biography
POPE BROCK is the author of the critically acclaimed Indiana Gothic, the story of his great-grandfather’s murder in 1908. Brock has written for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. He lives in upstate New York with his twin daughters, Molly and Hannah.