10 Deadly Things People Used To Think Were Harmless

By Peter Austin / February 5, 2016

8. Goat Gonads

In 1912, American radio pioneer John Romulus Brinkley bought a fake medical degree and went on to make millions with a completely unfounded surgical procedure intended to cure impotence in men.

From 1918, Brinkley performed dozens of operations during the Great Depression centred around transplanting a pair of goat testicles into an infertile man, because science.

Of course, you don€™t need a fake doctorate from Kansas City Eclectic Medical University to guess that the goat gonads were invariably rejected by the patient€™s body and multiple people died of septicaemia as a result which, to put it lightly, is a major balls-up.