Chapter V

A YEAR OF DEVELOPMENT

The intention in offering for your perusal the preceding newspaper accounts of Dr. Brinkley’s work in the opening months of the year 1920 was to show you what his views at that time were regarding the value of the gland operation which he has since made his life-work. The Chicago Tribune speaks of it as incidental to his general work as a surgeon. Dr. Brinkley himself speaks of shortly beginning an experiment upon an old man of 80. A year later he looked back upon a record of achievement of the most astounding results in operations performed upon men of 75, 80, and even 81. During this past year he has perfected his technique, implants the male glands exclusively into men and the female glands or ovaries into women, and has definitely selected the scrotum of the man as the only right place in which to introduce the goat-glands for the transplantation. You are here viewing the development of a great scientific discovery from the beginning of its employment upon human beings. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the year 1922 will produce no embellishment of value in the form of a wider application of the method. Some very striking limitations have been established during the past year’s work. For instance:

If the blood examination shows a positive Locomoter Ataxia, in which there is invariably a history of syphilis, the goat-glands take hold without exception, the efficacy of the transplantation in this disease, hitherto incurable by any means known to man, being due to the power of the new glands to cause a dissolving of scar-tissue, in the opinion of Dr. Abrams of San Francisco, who investigated the remarkable results attained by Dr. Brinkley in his cures of Locomoter Ataxia by the goat-gland operation.

If the goat-glands are transplanted into members of the Hebrew race there follows invariably a high temperature persisting for several days, after which the cure proceeds normally without any untoward occurrence. Glands transplanted into a negro will slough, or, at least, they did so in the one case on

“I am 77 years old, employed as commercial salesman by one of the largest manufacturing companies of its kind in the world, and command a good salary and the confidence of my employers. Since my operation at Dr. Brinkley’s hospital I am now their free lance salesman, opening up new territory and making good money. Any doubting Thomas may send me a self-addressed envelope if he questions the genuineness of what I say here about myself, and I will take time to answer him. First, the operation is absolutely painless. For a number of years I was a martyr to Sciatica and Muscular Rheumatism. I used every Patent Medicine I could hear of, besides Osteopathy and Chiropractic, and innumerable prescriptions from physicians, and received no Kansas City Post last Spring about Dr. Brinkley’s Goat-Gland operation, and decided to try it right away. I was in such misery I would have tried anything. Now I want to tell you, in the fewest words, that the amazing truth is that I have not had a twinge of pain of any kind at all since the operation, and have only a memory of my former suffering. This is a marvelous thing. I have the feeling of a youth. Whenever you want to hear from me I will write again and tell you what changes have taken place in me as the result of this operation. If I was asked to put a cash value upon the operation in my own case I could not do it, but I can say that all I possess in cash would be a poor equivalent for the difference the operation has made in my life. What is the difference in cash value between a life that is worth living and one that is constant misery? I don’t know how you would fix that value, but that is the difference the operation has made in me.

S. H. ERNST.”

Dr. Brinkley has kept in close touch with Mr. Ernst, and received other letters, not for publication, in which the old gentleman went frankly into details of the change that had been wrought in him by the operation in the matter of astonishing sexual vigor. For

Apart from the genuinely happy tone of his letters to Dr. Brinkley, the phenomenon of the darkening of the hair strikes most sharply on the attention. Perhaps our satisfaction in this particular piece of evidence of rejuvenation is due to the fact that it is an objective proof; something visible to the eye, tangible; something for which we are not required to take anybody’s opinion, but can trust our eyesight for the fact of it. It is something in which the psychic factor, the feelings, the imagination, the auto-suggestion, does not enter at all, and that is why it is exceedingly well worthy of note. Looking back over the years, and casting up in your minds all the people of sixty and seventy years of age whom you have known, can you put your finger on a single one whose hair turned in color from white to dark and at the same time from thin to thick? You probably cannot. Nor can the writer. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the goat-glands alone have done this thing in the case of Mr. Ernst.