These are some of the most striking friezes we have ever seen. Art-Deco styled Aztec gods with eagle bodies and taloned feet scowl down at the humans walking by.
This building was built by Dr. John R. Brinkley, a noted quack doctor who transplanted goat testicles into human men. YIKES!!! Brinkley had been run out of Kansas, but was invited to relocate his incredibly successful if dangerous (or at best) worthless medical empire in Del Rio.
Brinkley brilliantly used the power of radio to bring desperate patients to his hospital. He invested in owned "border blaster" radio stations XER (and later XERA) that broadcasted at an estimated 1 million watts, spreading the word about his "goat gland" treatments for "lack of male pep" from Mexico to Canada.
After Brinkley's his border blasters wrre shut down by the Mexican government in 1938, his need for this hospital and hotel waned. The hotel was converted to apartments decades ago, and has declined precipitously.
These treatments were done at Dr. Brinkley's hospital over the border in Ciudad Acuna Mexico. Patients who came from all over North America stayed here in downtown Del Rio before and after their surgeries.
70 years after Dr. Brinkley's heyday, this grand apartment building as definitely seen better days. Blasterz were not comfortable getting out of our car to take more detailed photographs. We get the impression that the most desperate, addicted, and impoverished among Del Rio's citizens live here (in 2015).
From Texas Highways magazine: (
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Outlaws: Dr. John R. Brinkley
The greatest medical charlatan of them all and his empire of fraud in Del Rio
Written by T. Lindsay Baker.
Born in North Carolina in 1885, Brinkley attended a legitimate medical school in Chicago before dropping out and “finishing” his degree at the Eclectic Medical School of Kansas City. In 1917, he settled in the town of Milford; after a few months, a young farmer came to Dr. Brinkley lamenting that he had been unable to father another child, then the conversation drifted to farming, rams, and buck goats. Brinkley reportedly joked to his patient that “you wouldn’t have any trouble if you had a pair of those buck glands in you.” The farmer unexpectedly responded, “Well, why don’t you put ’em in?” A year after Brinkley implanted slivers of goat testicles in his patient’s scrotum, the farmer and his wife became parents of a healthy son.
Dr. Brinkley expanded his practice to include a hospital, behind which stood ?a corral filled with billy goats. He promoted his operation as curing not only male sexual dysfunction but also afflictions such as high blood pressure, epilepsy, diabetes, senility, obesity, and dementia. To reach distant audiences, Brinkley secured a license for a new AM radio station, and found avid listeners for his monologues ?on child care, hygiene, and procreation. “All energy is sex energy,” he proclaimed.
As early as 1928, the American Medical Association began monitoring Brinkley’s activities. Two years later, the organization singled him out as “reeking with charlatanism of the crudest type.” The Federal Radio Commission chose in June 1930 not to renew Brinkley’s broadcasting license, then the Kansas Medical Board withdrew Brinkley’s license to practice medicine within the state. He began looking for new fields. He decided that if the U.S. government had taken away his radio license, he would move outside the country and beam his messages back. “Radio waves pay no attention to lines on a map,” he quipped.
Authorities in Del Rio and Villa Acuña, across the Rio Grande, invited the flamboyant physician to relocate, with the Mexicans offering a 10-acre site for a broadcasting station at no cost.
Dr. Brinkley made the six-story, air-conditioned Roswell Hotel his Del Rio medical headquarters. In addition to attracting patients to the hospital, Brinkley and his advertisers used the broadcasts to sell everything from tomato plants to Last Supper tablecloths.
Brinkley’s broadcasting power grew in stages until late 1935, when XERA’s strength reached an incredible 1 million watts. Brinkley’s on-air lectures on bloating, fistulae, and enlarged prostates could be heard all across the Great Plains to Canada and at times on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
When the end came for Dr. Brinkley, ?it came quickly. In 1941, Brinkley declared bankruptcy, a newly elected Mexican president expropriated station XERA, and Brinkley developed a blood clot in his left leg, which led to gangrene and the removal of the limb. While he convalesced, federal marshals served Brinkley with a warrant charging him with mail fraud. He never went to trial. On May 26, 1942, the old goat gland doctor met his Maker.
For information on sites related to Brinkley in Del Rio, see Gangster Tour of Texas, and contact the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce, 830/775-3551."
For more on Dr Brinkley see here: (
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