Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, your award-winning Texas

history podcast. This is your host Ken Wise. Thanks very much for tuning in today.

We're going to talk a little Texas history. This podcast is being released in the late summer of 2022. It's been hot and dry all summer

but we finally got a little rain and hope you got some of it. We don't want any

hurricanes but we'll take all the rain that we can get. I want to wish all the students a happy and blessed school year as school

starts to go back. Mine are started now and I know there are a lot of teachers all over the state using this podcast in their classes, which I appreciate very much.

I hope it's helpful. Let me know teachers at host at wiseabout Texas.com, what you'd like to hear about.

And I always love visiting

classrooms around the states one of the things this podcast has afforded me the

opportunity to do so if you want me to come speak to to your class, sheet me an email host at wise about Texas.com,

and we'll see if we can work something out.

Today we're going to talk about, this is part one of a pretty interesting story.

It's a story about a doctor with a rather strange medical practice,

and it ends up with media and culture being changed forever in the United States.

So we're going to go back to the early 1900s and get wise about Texas.

Our story starts in Kansas.

Now that's an odd place for a Texas history story to begin, but we need to meet the central character.

And his name is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley.

Brinkley was born in 1885.

He was born in the hills of North Carolina. He grew up poor, but managed to finish high school.

He always wanted to be a doctor. And legend has it that he showed up at Johns Hopkins Medical School and was rejected because he was dressed like a hillbilly.

Or rather I should say dressed like the hillbilly that he was.

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