Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Dr. Brinkley's Miracle Cure For Impotence (with Betwixt The Sheets)

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Cautionary Conversation: In the 1920s, a conman convinced America that goat testicles were the secret to male virility. Tim Harford and Dr Kate Lister (Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society) dive into the bizarre and grisly tale of "Doctor" John Brinkley. This snake oil salesman mobilised the power of radio marketing to build an empire on goat gland transplants and other quack "cures". And Brinkley might have got away with it, were it not for his nemesis: the tenacious Dr. Morris Fishbein. Find Betwixt the Sheets here: https://podfollow.com/betwixt-the-sheets-the-history-of-sex-scandal-society For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Milford, Kansas. 1917. A 46-year-old farmer walks into the local drugstore and bashfully asks the town's young doctor if he can talk to him about a rather delicate matter. Although John Romulus Brinkley is a newcomer to the rural Kansas town, he's proven himself by helping the locals through a recent flu epidemic. Sensing the man's embarrassment, the doctor ushers him into a back room. The problem is, the man explains, hesitatingly, he's lacking in, erm, pep. His tyres are flat. In short, he can't get it up. He and his wife long for a child to complete their family. Can the doctor help?

Brinkley explains that he's tried treating the sexually weak with serums and tinctures and even electricity, but nothing has worked. Then remembering his time working at an abattoir, Brinkley jokes, you wouldn't have any trouble if you had a pair of those buck glands, didn't you? Well why don't you put them in? asks the farmer. Brinkley will later say that he felt sickened by the idea and tried to halt the conversation by explaining the grave health risks, but the farmer is desperate to father a child and willing to give anything a go.

I don't have a goat, the doctor protests. I do, the farmer replies. And so late one night, the farmer, along with his billy goat, pays a visit to the doctor's office for a testicle transplant. Two weeks later, the farmer makes another late night visit to the doctor's office, this time with a spring in his step and a cheque for $150, equivalent to thousands of dollars today. He is delighted with his goat gland implants and has been telling his friends. Soon more men are making late night visits to the Milford drugstore. Dr Brinkley needs bigger premises and a barn for the goats.

Patients will pick out the beasts whose testicles they want implanted into their own. Men will come from all over America seeking treatment. Brinkley travels too, setting up temporary clinics across America and even taking his treatments abroad. Newspapers report on the touring goat-gland doctor and the man himself discovers that the cutting-edge technology of radio can bring him even more patients. So many, he'll have to build a proper road between Milford railway station and his hospital. A man is as old as his glands. And his glands are as old as his sex glands, Brinkley tells

his patients. So eager are they to feel the effects of revitalised sex glands that few stop to ponder the medical credentials of the charming Dr. Brinkley. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Dr John Romulus Brinkley was a showman, a great self-publicist and an unreliable narrator. The story about the farmer, for example, comes from Brinkley himself, and not everything he said was true. In particular, not everything he said about his own medical qualifications. To guide us through the fantastical claims of Dr John R Brinkley and his no less fantastical

life is Dr Kate Lister, host of one of my favourite podcasts, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society. Kate, I am a huge fan. Welcome to Cautionary Tales. Well thank you very much for having me on. I'm always happy to talk about Goat Glans. I mean, the crossover between Betwixt the Sheets and Cautionary Tales is... Well it's not too hard to find. No. No, this has been a long time coming, hasn't it? Really? No pun intended, but yes, it really has. It really has.

I am very, very keen to hear more about Dr Brinkley. If you will pardon the pun, his story is nuts. He was a fucking lunatic, that's who he was. Okay, so I think we already gathered that, but give us the backstory. So before we get into these unusual treatments, what was his early life like? Was there any sign of this interest in goat plans? What we know about him is gathered from his own testimony and testimony of people he knew him and various historical records. But you've got to take everything with a pinch of salt

when it comes to Brinkley, because he was the master of spin. He appears to have been born in Carolina only a decade after the Civil War had ended. So you sort of have to factor that into it. It was the bloodiest conflict America had ever seen. So it's a post-war world. Everyone's kind of walking around like, what on earth was that? He's born, he grows up quite poor.

His parents die when he's young, and he's raised by an aunt and an uncle and he gets married in his twenties. At some point he works in an abattoir which is where we think he first saw a goat and went, oh I'll store that away for future use. Yeah I could use that, yes. For some reason he thought that a goat was the most hygienic animal. That's his first red flag that one isn't it?

I have all sorts of thoughts about goats but hygienic is not the one that... It doesn't leap to mind of it. Maybe that's just my own ignorance. Maybe that's just our goat prejudice. But anyway, he thought that they were fantastic. He gets married to his first wife, a woman called Sally Wick, and they go on the road as this kind of traveling medicine act together. So you've already got the start of this combining of quack medicine and showmanship. So they would go to rural towns and sort of put on a big show for the local folks and then flog them.

Well snake oil really, just nonsense and rubbish but they were pretty good at it. There's a famous economics paper about the history of the market for snake oil and it grew hugely during the period we're discussing, so the late 1800s and then the first half of the 20th century, huge market and a lot of it involved circuses. So you had to get a crowd in order to sell them whatever it was that you were selling them. And circus is a good way to attract attention. It seems completely mad. I mean, would you take medical advice from a clown at a circus? Nothing against clowns, but that wouldn't be my first port of call. But I guess when we think about the demand for what we might call unproven treatments today, they're being

sold on the TikTok, on YouTube and again it's attention. You've got an influencer, somebody you're paying attention to because they're doing interesting things and then suddenly they're trying to sell you their latest goop or creams or pills and it's not so different. If he'd been around today I think he would have been on TikTok, would Brinkley. But he was traveling around towns, he's doing his act, he's selling nonsense. And then at some point he tries to settle down in Chicago and he must have had a thought along the way of like, I'm not really a doctor. Yeah. Well, okay. Spoiler, he's not a doctor.

Something must have occurred to him, like I'm treating all these people and I'm not a medical person at all. So he had no medical qualifications? He had a can-do attitude, Tim, is what he had. He had pluck grit. That's what I wanted my doctorate. Did he claim to be a doctor or did he have any sort of qualifications at all? Not at this point. And the qualifications that he does get are best described as dubious. He went to study at the Chicago Bennett Medical School.

Eclectic medicine was just sort of the study of botany, herbal cures and a bit of physiotherapy as well. So it's already a little bit okay. And it's not an accredited college that he's studying at and he doesn't even manage to finish it because he can't pay the tuition fees. At this point he seems to be working a lot of different jobs to try and pay these fees and he can't so he drops out. And then eventually he goes to the Kansas City Eclectic Medical School, which is again is a nonsense, it's just a front. They were known as diploma mills and he just buys a diploma in the same way that occasionally charlatans get exposed today because they've bought a PhD online.

Okay, so he's got a fig leaf of a qualification, but he hasn't really gotten any serious training. And then he ends up in Milford, Kansas. How did he end up there from Chicago? He ditches his wife, by the way, in between these two points, and his children. He just leaves them. And he takes up with another woman called Minnie, who he bigamously marries. And at this point, he's trying to run a kind of a medical center in Chicago where he's basically injecting men with coloured water and telling them that this is good for their manly vigour. And the authorities get wise to it and so he needs to get out there quick smart. And there's an advert for the town of Milford where they

need a physician. So he thinks that will do me and him and Mini pack up their spotted handkerchief and head to Canberra. Yeah. And then flu hits and he tends people through the... He was really popular. I mean... A good bedside manner will get you a long way. It will. And with flu, I mean, at the time there was no flu vaccine, I guess there's no treatment. So you just kind of like be nice to people and...

Be nice to people, chicken soup, that kind of thing. But he was really popular when he first arrived because he's this new doctor. Nobody's questioning that he calls himself a doctor. It's a small rural town, there's a few hundred people and they're just thrilled to have a doctor. And then somehow he makes this leap from eclectic medicine, so basically coloured water and some herbs and spices and that's pretty ordinary. There's a lot of people doing that at this point in history. He leaps into the goat gland game. I know that there are different accounts of the first operation but we know that he did in fact implant goat glands. So where

would – I really am gonna regret asking this, where did he put them? Well, he put them into the testicles, into the scrotums of men, and there were descriptions of the surgery that he did. Scrotums being stretchy, there's room for four testicles rather than two. You've pretty much got it.

So he had this idea that you had to use the goat's gland within 20 minutes of severing it. So he would basically castrate the goat, cut out the gland from the testicle, put it in salted water to keep it at room temperature, and then rush it into the other room, where he would have numbed up his victim's scrotum with local anesthetic.

And then with two incisionsisions he would put the entire gland just under the surface of the skin and he said that he was doing things like joining up blood vessels and ensuring oxygen supply. He wasn't doing any of that. He's just jamming a bollock in and then he stitches it up. That's what he was doing. That can't be good for you. But you know what? He didn't come up with this in a vacuum. This was the time of very, very early hormone treatment. And I say early in the fact that they discovered what hormones were. And he wasn't the only mad person grafting testicles into other testicles.

There was an American-Russian physician called Serge Voronov, who at least was medically qualified. And he was doing it with monkey testicles. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I don't know. I don't know. But you could... I mean this is part of the story actually which is that you've got these quacks, but the mainstream of medical practice is not necessarily any better. It doesn't necessarily have any more evidence. They've just got more authority.

And it made sense to them in a way of like, right, we've discovered that testosterone is important for men and it makes them feel peppy. And we've discovered it's made in testicles. So if we take a testicle and we put it in another testicle, see how it's fallen apart quite quickly now. But I was like, I was with you right up until that. It feels like spinal tap. Four testicles is more than two. So that was the theory behind it. So you've got Serge Voronov doing it with monkey glands. Apparently he wasn't inserting the entire gland.

He was cutting slivers off and then stitching it up inside men's scrotums. He at least was medically trained and had some gloss of pseudoscience with it. Brinkley had nothing. He just had a scalpel and a goat. Now the thing that I find most astonishing about this is that a load of men seemed really keen to have this done. It was hugely popular. Curing around the block. It was hugely popular. The gland therapy, as it was called at the time, was really big

in the 20s and 30s. You could even buy rejuvenating face cream that as it was called at the time, was really big in the 20s and 30s. You could even buy like rejuvenating face cream that claimed it was made from glands. It was like the thing because it was like a pseudo hormone treatment. The absolute apex of it was having actual testicles. So apparently the first person that came to Brinkley and went, would you please put a goat testicle inside mine? And he went, ooh, I'll have to have a think about that. And eventually, when you're all right then. So he said that he wanted to do this because he was impotent and his wife wanted to get pregnant. And lo and behold, his wife becomes

pregnant. The baby is born, they call him Billy. Of course they do. And it's hailed as the first goat glam baby because if there's one thing Brinkley is amazing at, it's self-publicity. I've got in front of me a copy of his advertisement for Billy the first goat gland baby. So if I show that to you. Oh wow. I'm looking at... Oh what a cute baby. It doesn't look at all like a goat, does it? I mean a toddler I guess, rather than a baby, but it looks about one. But yes, Kansas Surgeon uses goat glands to cure sterility. First goat gland baby.

Dr John R Brinkley and Billy. Amazing. So he uses this as an opportunity to launch this incredible treatment. This young boy, Billy, is used as the definitive proof. And it's peddled as this cure. It'll get rid of impotence, it'll pep you up, it'll rejuvenate your sex life and he was charging people well it's about $750 but in today's money that's well over 10 grand. Off the top of my head I would say that's probably a year's income. Depends exactly

how you measure it. Can I just show how desperate people were for this treatment though? Yeah and people today spend a great deal for fertility treatment. You know, it's enormously important of course. Just cast your mind back to when Viagra was launched. People lost their minds with it, didn't they? There was reports of doctors having to stamp prescriptions with a rubber stamp because the hand was cramping from signing so many of them. So that's how popular Viagra was. This was their Viagra. And they really thought that it was going to work. So he has queues around the block,

and not just from the local community. There was Chinese patients who came to see him that had been travelling around the world and thought they would just stop off in Kansas to have goat testicles put inside themselves. And it becomes this huge media sensation. This is one of the reasons why nerds like me are very keen on randomized trials. Because people are able to convince themselves that all sorts of things work. Impotence is sometimes just in your head. Sometimes it's got a physical cause, sometimes you're overthinking it. And I can well imagine that this guy went home from his goat-land operation,

full of confidence and suddenly he could get it up. So when they look at placebo effect it's more effective if the person administering the treatment looks like a doctor, has a white coat, calls themselves a doctor. If there's some level of surgical intervention we're more inclined to believe. And this has got all of the above. Plus when they go home they actually do have a lump in their scrotum that is a goat's testicle. So, I mean, I am unaware if there is any medical benefit whatsoever to doing this. I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.

Kate, you can't argue with results. Baby Billy was born. Baby Billy was born. The first goat-gland baby. Customers are happy. I can't imagine that anything is going to go wrong. But we'll find out after the break. You are listening to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford, with my special guest, Dr Kate Lister, of the brilliant Betwixt the Sheets podcast. And so after the break, we will hear the next twist in the story about how the goat-gland doctor became a radio star. MUSIC Welcome back to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford,

and the inimitable Dr Kate Lister. So Kate, we're a hundred years ago, the early 1920s. At this point, just how big was Brinkley's goat gland transplant operation? It was big and it was growing all the time because the more he did it, the more he self-publicised, the more people wanted to come and see him. So it becomes this beast that's feeding on itself. And he would do things like get famous newspaper editors to come and have a transplant and they would then report on their progress. Some guy from the LA Times, Henry Chandler, came down and he said, I know, I know, see

that's commitment to journalism. I've met a couple of newspaper editors. I'm not sure know, see that's commitment to journalism. I've met a couple of newspaper editors, I'm not sure they'd go for the go-glow. Do they need more testicles? Really not. But he would do things like that and then he would, and then so then he's got major newspapers writing about him and his absolute coup de grace is he leapt into radio and he utilised that in such a powerful way. He set up his own radio

station and they called it KFKB. Can's first, Can's best. That's it. Can's first, Can's best. But it's very much the TikTok of the 1920s, right? This is the new cutting edge way of communicating. And it really was cutting edge as well. And he would have local acts and local music groups come on and do their little bit, like local choirs would come on and sing. But as well, he had his own segment, Twice Daily, where he would dispense medical advice.

Yeah. Which, you're into very dubious territory here again. People from all over the country would write in about their medical complaints. So all over the country? I thought it was a local radio station. It had a really big reach. It wasn't listened to just in Kansas. The power of this thing was enormous. I think at one point it was the biggest radio station in the country, the most popular and most listened to radio show.

So he's a huge success. Massive. And that sort of success must start to radio show. So he's a huge success. Massive. And that sort of success must start to attract scrutiny. Well it does. It's not local radio, so other people are listening in. And you've got a situation where Brinkley is reading out random people's medical complaints, diagnosing them live on the air and then prescribing a treatment that only his pharmacy could supply. So, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, some warnings going off there. But it was, again, massively, massively popular.

But you can imagine other doctors, real doctors with actual credentials, listening into this and going, Hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. Just give me a second. So he's getting way, way, way too big for his boots and he's making loads of money and his nemesis was an actual proper doctor, Maurice Fishbein, who was a member of the American Medical Association and he was hell-bent on exposing quacks and charlatans of which, as we've already said, there were many and this was his life's work.

So he was on to Brinkley pretty quickly. And he didn't hold back, did he was on to Brinkley pretty quickly. And he didn't hold back did he? He did not. He did not. Got one quote in front of me says that he described Brinkley as a charlatan of the rankest sort whose radio station was being used to victimise people and to enrich himself which I don't know seems fair enough. It's all true that's exactly what was happening.

But you've got to remember that Brinkley had managed to cultivate this huge popularity in the local community, and well, in the wider community as well. So to begin with, Maurice Fishbine is this sort of lone voice, like, oh, you meanie, trying to take away our young, successful doctor. And of course, the Milford residents love it because it's bringing loads of money to the town, it's bringing loads of business into the town. So they don't want to challenge this. They don't want to challenge it. Shut up, shut up!

I mean I found this when Cautionary Tales did the story of the radium dial company and these poor young women who were giving themselves radium poisoning, working, painting this radioactive paint on watch faces and other things. One of the problems they faced was that not only did the doctors not take them seriously and not only did the company deny everything, but their local community ostracized them because they were like, you are going to shut down this factory. It's the 1930s. It's a tough time economically, you're going to destroy everyone's jobs just because you're moaning about the fact that your jaw's fallen off or something.

They were so lonely because the local community would not back them against the Radium Dial company. And it seems that we've got a similar thing going on here with Brinkley. Yeah. Yeah, okay, fine. Maybe the goat glands work, maybe they don't, but this is jobs. This is jobs, this is income. And it's also put Milford on the map. The goat gland capital of the United States. The goat gland capital, isn't it fabulous? And there were loads of people out there who really think that he's helped them.

There are many others that did not. He was sued at least 12 times in the 1930s because unsurprisingly these operations were not a success. He's not going to give the testimonials of the people who wander back in going, Scrotum's gone purple. There were people having infections, there were people that died actually, so he was sued and kind of managed to bat it away and hush it up each time, but Maurice Fishbine was not going to let it go. He was extremely angry and so he starts exposing

him in very highly publicised news articles and then more people are kind of asking questions of like, hang on a minute, what do you mean he's not a doctor? That kind of thing. So do the authorities do anything? They do eventually. I mean, they have to get involved because he's practising medicine without a licence. He's operating on people with no qualifications or reason to do this at all. So eventually, yeah. That's apparently frowned upon, is it? It is frowned upon, even in 1930s. It's cause for people to have a think about it. So in

1930 he was called before the Kansas Medical Board to face 11 charges. It's like, can you show us your medical certificate? And he's just holding up a piece of paper with a doctor written in crayon on it. So when the Cancer's Medical Board looked into his qualifications, what sort of investigation did they do? They did a pretty thorough investigation actually, which in an act of, it's not even confidence, it's just lunacy. But this is how much of a charlatan he was. He actually invited members of the medical board to come and watch him do one of his

procedures. And they came? And they came, of course they came. So representatives come down and they watch him literally sewing goat balls into a human being with unsterilised equipment, at which point he's like ta-da! And is genuinely shocked that they go, holy ffff... No more for you. No, you are done. It's worth saying as well here that the boy goats survived, but the girl goats that he took ovaries out of to graft into women did not. Will no-one think of the goats?

No, just somebody's justice for the goats, that's all that I'm saying. They often get left out of this particular story. I see that his licence to practice was revoked on the grounds of gross immorality and unprofessional conduct. Yes, you can't get much firmer than that, can you? No, you can't. Okay, he's lost his licence to practice medicine, potentially a disaster. He's still got the radio though, he's still got that potential cash cow. He does, and it's a big cash cow as well. And he's still got his Dr. Brinkley show and he's still offering up medical advice and people are still writing in and he's still

peddling his quack cures. And it's all right for a while, but our mate Morris Fishbine hasn't forgotten about him. And the pressure is now coming on the Kansas authorities to investigate whether it is ethical or not to have a disbarred lunatic offering up medical advice. Yes, and the Federal Radio Commission get involved in the spoil sports. Spoil sports. But again, that's exactly what he is doing. He isn't a medically qualified doctor. The advice that he's given up is just gibberish and he's administering care to actual sick people. They're writing in with things that really are wrong with them.

And he's got no idea what he's talking about. Not a clue. Not a clue. So eventually they have to pull the plug on it and no more surgery and no more radio for you. So things are not looking good for Dr John R Brinkley because he's not a doctor anymore. He's not. And neither is he a DJ anymore. He's lost his radio show. Surely though, this can't be the end. This man is a master of reinvention. Dr Kate Lister will be back to continue his story after the break.

his story after the break. You're listening to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford, and my guest, Dr. Kate Lister of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast. So Kate, we've been hearing the story of Dr. Brinkley. He's a showman without a show. Because he lost his goat gland practice, he's lost his radio station, what's he going to do? If it was any other normal human being you'd just give up wouldn't you? I've been shamed on a national level here, I've been exposed as the worst kind of charlatan but not Brinkley. He decides politics, that's the place for me. That's what I will do. So he-

Who would have thought that a failed con man would be attracted by politics? It was the olden days, Tim, we'll never see the like again. So he runs twice to be the governor of Kansas. That's a big job. It's a big job. He's not just running for mayor.

No. Governor of Kansas. But as we've discovered, not being remotely qualified for a position is no obstacle to Brinkley. He just can do attitude. And so he's got all the stars of his KFKB radio station who can kind of shill for him and support him.

So how does it go? I mean, is he crushed? Not nearly as epically as you would hope that he would be. It's a reasonably close call. I think eventually he came in third, I think. So they had this rule in place where if the vote didn't match exactly the name that he's running under, which was John R. Brinkley, then the vote would be discounted.

So if somebody didn't put J.R. Brinkley, if they just put something like Doc Brinkley, it would just be thrown out immediately. It has been suggested that if that hadn't happened, he might have taken it. So he doesn't win in 1930 because of all those votes for Doc Brinkley and John Brinkley. He doesn't get in, he nearly makes it. He tries again in 1932, loses again. Can't be it for Brinkley. Well the second time that he ran, it did more damage to his public image because his opponents realised that they could make a mockery of him and they did. They held him up as just

this crank lunatic, goat ball guy who's been disbarred and discredited and da da da da. So it created even more... You would think that would have done more damage earlier but okay eventually they figure out that's an attack line. So he up sticks and he moves to Del Rio Texas which is way down there on the border where he tries again to practice medicine only this time he takes an increased interest in people's prostate glands. Why do I think that's worse? Somehow I think that's even worse. But OK. I don't think that he's injecting or grafting anything into anybody, but he's certainly

examining people. And this is like a world of suppositories and it's all nonsense. And again, it's the same thing. It's that it's manly vigor. It'll rejuvenate you. He gets another radio show. Another radio show. Another radio show, which again, proves to be incredibly popular. And again, is his downfall, because he can't just go somewhere and shut up and do his weird prostate thing. He has to broadcast it.

So again, he attracts attention. But the border is important there, right? Because he can put the radio transmitter in Mexico. Yeah. Yeah, so he gets around the American authorities that way. Because he's not allowed to do it in America, but in Mexico, even though they can hear it in America. Yeah, I think they called it a border blaster. So he's got this massive radio mast near his home, but it's in Mexico. And therefore he's immune to American regulation. And again, this show is broadcast across the states.

You could pick it up in every single one of the states. It was that powerful. So he resurrects his career, if indeed it ever really went away. By 1938, he's got another hospital in Arkansas. He's living the high life. He's got mansions. He's got yachts, Cadillacs, luxury holidays. Nothing can go wrong for Doc Brinkley.

Yeah, but Morris Fishbone hadn't forgotten about him. Oh right, his old nemesis. His old nemesis. Still there. And of course, because Brinkley can't keep quiet and stay off the radar, Morris Fishbone is just like, right, I'll have you. And he publishes a number of exposés calling him a quack and a charlatan. And in a desperate act, is it a mad act? It's certainly what

Oscar Wilde ended up doing. Brinkley, to defend himself against this, decides that he's going to sue him for libel. Toby – Bold move. Sarah – A terrible, don't do it if what the person is saying is perfectly true. Toby – Because it all then gets laid out in court. All of it. All of it gets laid out in court. The goat glands, the unsterilised equipment, the operating while drunk. The fact that 42 people that we know of died from these awful operations

because of infection and God knows what else. How many goats died? Yeah. Justice for the goats. I think we're probably going to leave with the 42 people dying. That's my suggestion. But yes. Fair enough. But that's not good for Brinkley. None of it's good for Brinkley. Obviously the court finds in Fishmine's favour.

I love the jury verdict is that Brinkley should be considered a charlatan and a quack in the ordinary well-understood meaning of these words. I like it. Yeah, and there you go. Now there's a legal precedent for it. He is legally a quack and a charlatan. And then I would love to have been a fly on a wall when this letter arrives. The IRS sue him for tax fraud. Yeah, because he wasn't paying his taxes. Of course he wasn't. Who would have thought?

Who would have thought? And then the post office sue him for mail fraud. Yeah, people sued him. It's like shark circling isn't it? Like once somebody's made the first bite, they're all going in. He loses everything and we're not going to feel remotely sorry for him at all. Right, so this is the end of the 1930s. Sounds like it's basically the end for Brinkley's career. Pretty much all avenues have been cut off for him. He kind of limps along for a little

bit muttering about the injustice of it and about trying to resurrect some kind of nonsense career. But he eventually suffers multiple heart attacks so his health is failing and he died in 1942 penniless and in disgrace. Kate, this has been a joy. Whenever we have one of our cautionary conversations I always try to reflect. I always want to learn the lessons from history. So one lesson I've learned is that I'm not going to have goat testicles implanted in my scrotum. A wise move. But maybe there are, who knows, maybe there are even broader lessons to draw. What do you take from all this?

I think there are lots of lessons from this for the modern world because medical quackery is still very much with us. There's still people out there peddling all manner of lotions and potions and pills and powders claiming to do this, that and the other and it doesn't do anything of the sort. I think check your credentials as well. Is like look into the background of the person that's selling you something. Just because they put on a good show doesn't mean that

they absolutely know what they're talking about. Yeah, I mean it is amazing how much gets sold basically by influencers now. It's on YouTube, it's on TikTok and actually the main reason why people buy it is because, well, they like the influencer. They find them impressive. They think they're cool. And that's enough. We should just be a bit firm with that and just say, no, we shouldn't be selling nonsense to people no matter what it does. All in favour of actual evidence. Evidence.

You know, the other thing that this whole story reminded me of, Kate, is, do you know Lydia E. Pinkham? Lily the Pink. I do know the story of Lily the Pink, yes. So we did a cautionary tale about her and as you know she developed this medicinal compound, most efficacious in every case, and it was basically just booze and some herbs and probably didn't do much harm, probably also didn't do much good. But what I was really struck by is, oh yeah, she's a quack, right? There's no evidence that this works. She's got no particular credentials. And they set up this operation and it makes a huge amount

of money. Then I looked at what the actual qualified medical profession had to offer for women's troubles. So we're talking period pains, extreme period pains, miscarriages, prolapse, uteruses, none of which the doctors at the time were really very interested in diagnosing. But what doctors were doing was prescribing medicines such as Calomel. Calomel is basically just a mercury compound. It rots your face away. It's poisonous. I mean, Lily was basically just giving people some medicine that was about as strong as sherry. It wasn't really going to do them any harm. And so one of the lessons that I drew, and I think this does tie into Brinkley too, is if people are not getting what they need from mainstream medicine, of course they're

going to look for alternatives. And Lydia Pinkham was another master at personal image, wasn't she? She had her face on billboards up and down the country as this trustworthy woman with her efficacious compounds. She was so famous. Great little story, when Queen Victoria died, some newspaper editors didn't actually have a photograph of Queen Victoria, so they slapped a picture of Lydia Pinkham instead. You know, lady of a certain age looks about right. Close enough. Yeah. Close enough. Yeah. Well I suppose that this is the broader lesson, right? If we don't have the real thing we go for a substitute. That's true if it's a

photograph of Queen Victoria or Lydia Pinkham but it's also true for medicines. Yeah. So two very different characters but fundamentally they're both spotting a gap in the market. And exploiting it. Or marketing themselves really successfully. Marketing is the best drug. Isn't it? Kate, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me. What do we call this? Betwixt the cautionary...

Betwixt the cautionary... Betwixt the cautionary tales. Well, if people would like a pure and unadulterated shot of Betwixt the Sheets, the podcast is available in all the usual pod places. It's available wherever you get your podcast. Just give us a Google and we will jump up. And just give us a five second. What is Betwixt the Sheets for people who don't know? Betwixt the Sheets is us having a look at the seedier side of history and getting Betwixt the Sheets of the great and the good and the not so great and the good as well and learning what our ancestors got up to in the sack. It's a joy to listen to, I love it. So I hope some more people will discover it. Kate

Lister, thank you so much. Thank you. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Alice Fiennes and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos Sanjuan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaph Haferi edited the scripts. The show features the voice

talents of Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembra, Sarah Jupp, Maseya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Co-Optionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on

Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.