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America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
by Pope Brock
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In the period before the First World War, the Reinhardt brothers, Willis and Wallace, owned a thriving chain of anatomical museums: the London Medical Institute, the Paris Medical Institute, the Heidelberg, the Copenhagen, and so forth. Located in Des Moines, Fort Wayne, East St. Louis, and other towns throughout the Midwest, they were devoted to the documentation and cure of "men's secret diseases." Most had big display windows facing the street, and what the Reinhardts put in those windows was the talk of the industry. Their most celebrated exhibit, in Minneapolis, was entitled "The Dying Custer."
He lay like Saint Sebastian, bristling with arrows, in a lavish three-dimensional tableau. Redskins, corpses, and plaster vultures added richness to the scene, but what kept passersby bunched at the window, staring in for minutes on end, was the slow, rhythmic heaving of Custer's chest. They gazed till their own breathing fell into sync--it was irresistible--and that gave the Reinhardts' message time to go to work. True, Custer's connection to impotence may have been largely metaphorical, but to a certain fretful portion of the populace it struck home. Power gone, youth destroyed--but not yet, not quite yet. Inside this building there was even hope for Yellow Hair.
Mixing terror and hope was the Reinhardts' stock-in-trade. Their window in Gary, Indiana--again designed by their visionary house artist, Monsieur Brouillard--featured a diorama of a doctor and nurse trying to save a syphilitic baby with the help of a wheezing resuscitator. But displays alone, no matter how artful, didn't make the Reinhardt twins tops in their field. From their headquarters at the Vienna Medical Institute in Chicago, where they rode herd on some three dozen franchises, they enforced levels of standardization and quality control remarkably ahead of their time. Starting with their training of salesmen: nobody worked for the Reinhardts without first graduating from the "instantaneous medical college" at the home office. This was followed by more training at the Gary branch, where each recruit was given a white coat, asked to grow a Vandyke, and made to practice his patter as if it were Gilbert and Sullivan. Only then were real customers released upon them. Serving as exhibition guides, the floor men were expected to nail twenty percent of all prospects--eight out of an average forty walk-ins a day--or look for another job. The manager of each institute sent headquarters a daily financial report in triplicate.
Admission was free at all these places. The abba-dabba juice was not. Bottles of it were on sale at the exit, a fabled elixir guaranteed to soothe, stimulate, inflate, reinstate, backdate, laminate, and in general make "the withered bough quicken and grow green again," while at the same time curing and/or preventing the clap; it adapted to the needs of the customer. What was in it? What was in any of them? What was in Dr. Raphael's Cordial Invigorant, America's first big virility tonic in the 1850s, whose royal Arabian formula was made vastly more potent by the "magical influence of modern Astrologers"? What was the recipe for Baume de Vie, Elixir Renovans, the Syrop Vitae of Anthony Bellou, the Glorious Spagyric of Jone Case, or any of the others in lands and ages stretching back to the dawn of time? For the record, the Reinhardts' tonic contained three ingredients--alcohol, sugar, and a dash of "Aqua Missourianas quantitat sufficiat ad cong II"--but this is pedantry.
Big as they were, the Reinhardts still had plenty of competition. Independents with similar rackets were out there grubbing in the twilight, men like Dr. Burke of Knoxville, Tennessee, who in 1907 was running his own small shop with the help of an assistant, Dr. John Brinkley.
Young Brinkley was a likely lad of twenty-two. To call him a doctor was, in the strictest sense, inaccurate, but if the white coat reassured people, the healing had begun. In truth he was the floor man and he worked on commission. Brinkley would study a prospect as he came through the door, then materialize--not too soon--at his elbow. The young physician chatted, he chuckled, he took a grave interest; he showed the man around. Soon the two were passing along the main line of exhibits: a stage-by-stage depiction of the male member in syphilitic decline. It spoke for itself. With each new cabinet the organ grew more deformed and the colors changed. Perhaps leprosy was mentioned by way of comparison.
Excerpted from Charlatan by Pope Brock Copyright © 2008 by Pope Brock. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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