The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and WomenFlower, Sydney Blanshard
History
The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and Women
Flower, Sydney Blanshard
Brinkley, John Richard, 1885-1942; Transplantation of organs, tissues, etc.
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 work. Their attitude was detached, but on the whole
affirmative. They could not, as they put it, doubt their own eyesight,
implying that they would do so if they could. They had seen case after
case carried into the hospital, and they had seen those same people walk
out and go their way to their homes. It was queer, they said, and wagged
a critical head. So true is it in all parts of the earth that a prophet
hath honor save in his own country! Here and there, however, the writer
found a townsman who had nothing but words of praise and admiration for
Dr. Brinkley's work. These always proved to be people who had had some
relative under Dr. Brinkley's care at the hospital, and they were
intelligent men who could give their reasons for their conclusions. They
were proud of the lustre which Dr. Brinkley's Goat-Gland work was
shedding upon the name of their village. Most of the townspeople,
however, seemed to think that Dr. Brinkley should be proud of the town.
Their engaging surliness of demeanor with regard to the miracles being
performed in their village was a fascinating study to a city man, who
saw here at its best the typical small-town attitude towards the big
local thing. It is not peculiar to Milford. It is universal. It is as
true in England and France and Belgium and Germany as in any little town
in the United States. What do you suppose the country villagers thought
of Fabre, the great French naturalist, probably to be hailed by the next
generation as the greatest figure since Darwin? Without doubt they
thought him mad, and if kindly, pitied him, or if savage, despised him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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