If I get those transplanted into me, can I only have sex in that position, doc? (This guy is smart enough to ask about side effects.)
It’s an entertaining and educational documentary on a quack, a medical fraud from another era. It’s Nuts! (2016), documenting the disquieting phenomenon of Dr. (not really) John Brinkley. Briefly, Brinkley began by transplanting goat testicles into impotent men in a small Kansas town. Initial success leads to more and more treatments, until during the Great Depression he’s pulling in thousands of dollars a week. But doom is waiting for him, which I shan’t reveal.
But what is also nuts is how he could charm all these people. The movie makers call him a folk doctor, a man who was a communications genius and knew how to play on the very prejudices and suspicions of elites harbored by those who listened to him on the radio in order to harvest their resources for his own egotistical use.
And what is even more nuts is the style in which the story is presented – most of it is animated! This is no dry recitation of facts, or a dubious re-enactment. This is fun with cartoons, mixed with contemporary film pieces of the man himself, complete with wife and child.
I’m not going to recommend it because it’s fun, and I’m not going to suggest to my readers that, if they have this or that belief or character feature, they should watch it. That would be insulting.
I’m going to simply suggest that anyone reading this should watch it. And be honest with yourself. Can you see yourself in the audience at the trial, in support of the doctor? And when he’s revealed as a fraud, and your support dries up, can you ask yourself with great honesty why you were suckered?
Or did I just ruin the entire experience for you?
This is the sort of stuff Skeptical Inquirer often covers, and I really enjoyed it.
