Chapter VIII

A WEEK AT DR. BRINKLEY’S HOSPITAL

The writer, approaching the age of 54, and finding himself in first-class physical and mental condition, except for a high blood pressure, which was certainly the prelude to a later arterio-sclerosis, decided that he would be doing himself a service, and put himself in a better position to write with some authority upon the effects of the goat-glands, if he took the operation.

On Saturday, April 16. 1921, Dr. Brinkley operated on him at the hospital, Milford, Kansas, transplanting the glands of a three-weeks old male goat. He remained in bed Saturday and Sunday, got up and went for an auto drive on Monday, and passed an uneventful week at the hospital, returning to Chicago on Saturday. He experienced a marked increase in mental energy, which might have shown itself also as increased physical energy if it had been put to the test. This feeling of added pep, snap, energy, or what you please to call it, could be psychological in its origin if it were not for the fact that it is continuous, with no set-backs. Every student of psychology is aware that auto-suggestion has the power to bring out latent energy, raise the drooping spirits, and generate a feeling of well-being. But the student, if he is a reasonably close observer, is also aware that these improved

Two weeks before his arrival a man suffering from locomotor ataxia had been carried in, unable to help himself at all. When the writer saw this man and talked with him he was up

This man had been everywhere for relief, and had taken every treatment known for his

In another case of the same disease the patient, when he came to the hospital, was taking morphine daily to relieve the lightning-pains. He could not stand upright with his eyes shut without falling, and if spoken to suddenly was likely to lose his balance and fall. He had not walked without a cane for several years. Twenty-four hours after the goat-gland operation he said that the pains had left him, and voluntarily stopped the morphine. In two weeks he was walking five miles before breakfast, without a cane to help him. He left the hospital a cured man. There has never been a case of true locomotor ataxia cured by any means whatever, in the history of man, until this Kansas surgeon, Dr. Brinkley, found the cure for it in this transplantation of goat-glands. Ataxia is an after-math of syphilis, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and it is a question, which no layman can solve, whether the cause of the ataxia is in the disease, or in the mercurial treatment used to combat the disease. Another age, following this, may decide that the disease, syphilis, is less destructive of human tissue than the cure, Mercury. However that may be, the fact remains that goat-glands will cure Locomotor Ataxia, and they are apparently the only means of cure hitherto discovered.

The writer talked with some of the townspeople of Milford regarding Dr. Brinkley’s