of Sally directly, he wrote that they had been married in New York City, and that he did not know her current place of residence. The divorce was finalized on February 21, 1916. Four days later, Minnie and Brinkley were married again, this time in Liberty, Missouri. Brinkley had not waited the required six months from divorce to subsequent remarriage. In 1917, Brinkley, now an Army Reservist, was called up for service during World War I. However, he only served a little over two months, most of the duration of which he was sick with a nervous breakdown, before being discharged. In October of the same year, Brinkley and his wife moved to Milford, Kansas, after having spotted a newspaper advertisement saying the town needed a doctor. Goat gland transplantation In 1918, Brinkley opened a 16-room clinic in Milford, where he won over the locals immediately by paying good wages, invigorating the local economy and making house calls on patients afflicted with the virulent and deadly outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic. For all his later infamy as a charlatan, accounts of his success at nursing flu victims back to health, and the lengths to which he went to treat them, were resoundingly positive. As recounted in the biography that Brinkley had commissioned, he struck upon the idea of transplanting goat testicles into men when a patient came to him to ask if he could fix someone who was "sexually weak". Brinkley responded by joking that the patient would have no problem if he had "a pair of those buck [goat] glands in you". The patient then begged Brinkley to try the operation, which Brinkley did, for $150. (The patient's son later told The Kansas City Star that Brinkley had in fact offered to pay his father "handsomely" if he'd go along with the experiment.) At his clinic, Brinkley began to perform more operations he claimed would restore male virility and fertility through implanting the testicular glands of goats in his male patients at a cost of $750 per operation ($ in current dollars). Following one of his crude operations, the body of a patient would typically absorb the goat tissue as foreign matter. The goat gonads failed to engraft into the body, as they were simply placed within the human male testicle sac or the abdomen of women, near the ovaries. Unsurprisingly, in light of his questionable medical training