“Seventy-five years ago my father had a little German machine,” Tobias said, “called the ‘life waker.’ It was a disk as big as a dollar with a lot of needles in it. You jabbed it into the small of the back and waked life that way. We can laugh at that archaic system, for it was crude. Now we’re more scientific. Witness the transplantation of goat-glands.”
Tobias said he went to see Dr. Brinkley at Milford, Kansas, to investigate his goat-gland discovery because of long suffering from congestion of the brain arteries. Doctors had told him he was in danger of death because of severe attacks of vertigo and a high blood pressure.
“The operation,” Tobias said, “occupied about 20 minutes. Within three hours after the operation the goat-gland began to function, the congestion was relieved, and within three days the cause was eliminated.
“I am a new man physically, with new mental vigor, and a new power of sustained effort. I can distinctly sense the function of a new gland in my body.”
It must have functioned muscularly, for when I left Tobias gave me a knuckle-crushing grip which made it necessary to write this story with my left hand.
These newspaper articles are printed here without change, in spite of evident repetitions, because of their evidential value. It is an old trick of the public press in the United States, and probably in Europe also, to start a sensation with a blazing front page story, and in the course of a few weeks follow it with a complete and sarcastic expose of the whole matter as a baseless fabrication, piling facts on facts to show that the first story was an ingenious piece of deception got up by the subject with the purpose of making capital out of the credulity of the public. There are no better detectives in the world than newspaper men. They work for the love of it. An expose is dearer to the detective-instinct in them than a laudatory article, and they leave no stone unturned to get at the facts. When, therefore, after the lapse of months, the newspapers of the United States repeat and confirm their first stories about Dr. Brinkley’s work it means something to one who knows their methods of working. Money cannot buy this sort of publicity. There must be facts, and facts of value, and facts verified again and again, before stories of this kind appear and reappear in the great organs of publicity in all the big cities of the United States. How far they carry, and how wide-reaching is the interest, will be understood by the statement that the announcement of Dr. Brinkley’s work, printed first in American newspapers, and copied in the English papers, has brought him urgent requests to visit South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Scotland, and many other
countries. From England in particular come requests from women that he do not fail to make a journey to some part of Europe in the summer of 1921, in order that they may take the operation with a view to bearing children. This he has arranged to do about June of this year, expecting to find in England a climate during the months of June, July and August, which will not be too hot to prevent him from transplanting the goat-glands. He does not operate at his hospital in Kansas during June, July and August, on account of the heat, having found that when the outdoor temperature is high the glands will certainly slough. The high temperature without seems to create a high temperature for the patient, and the result is a wasted pair of good goat glands, with loss of time and money to all concerned. In England in the summer it should be necessary to wait a few days only for right climatic conditions to present themselves, and be sure that they will do so. There are the further matters of a supply of goats of the right Toggenburg breed, a place to keep them, in close proximity to the operating hospital, and the hospital itself, to be dealt with suitably in the shortest possible space of time after arrival. The supply of goats can probably be best procured direct from Switzerland through some London importer, and the other matters will no doubt fall easily into place. The goats must not come from a high altitude, or their glands will not contain a right amount of iodine. This is curiously important. Dr. Brinkley cannot use goats from Colorado for
that reason. If the doctor’s reception in England is cordial he will probably make his visit there an annual summer affair of three months’ duration for some years to come, which would give him an opportunity of keeping in continued touch with his English and European patients. The English are a practical people, and less sensitive than we to, or more careless of, ridicule, and they are likely to grasp the importance of Dr. Brinkley’s work on the instant of his arrival, compelling a long visit.