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Monday, February 18, 2008
Gullible’s travels
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In 1922, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Harry Chandler, invited Dr. John Binkley to come to Los Angeles and perform the miracle surgery that had made him famous. Binkley obliged, and worked his magic on a number of patients, including a Times managing editor, a judge, and several unnamed Hollywood stars.
Binkley’s procedure was to take goat testicles and implant them into a man’s scrotum as a “cure” for impotence. The Los Angeles Times heralded the surgeries with the headline: “New Life in Glands — Dr. Binkley’s Patients Here Show Improvement — Many Victims of Incurable Diseases Are Cured.”
The stunning new non-fiction book “Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam” by Pope Brock chronicles, with a rollicking sense of fun mixed with outrage, the truly unbelievable career of Binkley, who probably killed dozens if not hundreds of patients over his life, more than most serial killers. These bizarre surgeries weren’t happening in some long-ago time, but in America in the 20th century. In fact, Binkley and his wife attended the world premiere of “Gone With the Wind” in Atlanta in 1939.
Although Binkley put forth many alleged cures over the years, his main clientele was impotent men. There was a lot of euphemistic talk of “youthful vigor” and being “fully a man” in his ads and testimonials. And because of the placebo effect, many men actually got better.
I’m sure a lot of readers will read “Charlatan” and think that we have come so far, that we could never believe such utter nonsense as that transplanting goat testicles would cure impotence. But then I thought about all the emails that are going around right now that people are convinced are true - that the Ku Klux Klan has endorsed Barack Obama, that Bill Gates will donate money to a cause if you forward this email, that brokers are offering Third World children as organ donors. Not to mention the controversy over that book about “Miracle Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About.” And I think we are just as gullible as ever, just about different things.
What do you think? Are we making progress in letting ourselves be scammed or are we as bad as ever?
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