Word: goat
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...from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City (a diploma mill), a membership in the Masons, and a Saxon Six automobile. Then a rustic came to Brinkley with the complaint that he was a "flat tire," sexually inert. Somehow, Brinkley hit on the idea of implanting a fragment of goat gonad in the old fellow's testicles. He did, and before long the patient had recuperated to the extent that he was able to sire a healthy son-a lad named, appropriately enough, Billy...
Pick Your Operation. Brinkley called his operation a graft. It was. of course, merely a swindle. But goat glands caught on. There were difficulties at first; it developed that glands from Angora goats gave patients an enduring stench, so stinkless Toggenberg goats were used. Brinkley showed flair approaching genius by allowing his suckers to choose their own goats, much in the manner, as the author observes, as one could pick his own lobster at a Maine shore restaurant. Later, the goat doctor refined his pitch: "Operations performed according to your selection; you pay only for what you choose." The suckers...
...Brinkley cannily secured a license to operate a powerful radio station, KFKB (for "Kansas First, Kansas Best"). Taking the air between concerts by hillbilly bands and sessions by the "Tell Me a Story Lady," Brinkley read sermons, pitched hard for goat glands, and made "snapshot diagnoses" of the ailments of his correspondents. "Now here is a letter from a dear mother," he would croon, "a dear little mother who holds to her breast a babe of nine months. She should take Number 2 and Number 16 and-yes-Number 17 and she will be helped." Brinkley got $1 a bottle...
...Mexico near Del Rio, Texas. Brinkley tried twice more to become Governor of Kansas, and in 1940 let it be known that he had received 500,000 letters urging him to run for President as the Republican candidate. But by the end of the decade, the enthusiasm for goat glands had subsided (although Brinkley made $810,000 in 1939). He lost a libel suit against his archenemy, the A.M.A.'s Dr. Morris Fishbein. The goat doctor retired from quackery, and in 1941, after prudently shifting most of his wealth to his wife and friends, declared bankruptcy. Sadly he told...
Away from the coast, Venezuela is a varied land of goat-ridden droughtland, snowy peaks, Amazonian jungle and the lofty, remote eastern mesas where Sir Walter Raleigh looked for El Dorado. Bone-chilled peasants tend their flocks of goats on the slopes of a spur of the Andes; cowboys ride through the tough, chest-high grass of the llanos-Venezuela's central prairie-driving herds of bony cattle before them. In one of the few spots in Venezuela that are radically changed-a cooperative sugar farm on the estate of a Pérez Jiménez crony long...