This manuscript is a single personal document from the Dr. John R. Brinkley Papers: a five-page letter dated December 2, 1928 and addressed to Brinkley’s infant son, John Richard Brinkley III. When read carefully, the letter reveals how Brinkley—already a controversial and wealthy physician—wanted to shape his son’s understanding of family and self. Composed on personalized stationery from his clinic in Milford, Kansas, the letter traces the family’s lineage back to the mountains of western North Carolina, recounts the lives and deaths of parents and grandparents, and offers a moral lesson about perseverance and education. Brinkley directs his son to the locations of ancestral graves, describes his own childhood of poverty and toil along the Tuckaseegee River, and urges “Johnnie Boy” to study hard, join the Masons and Kiwanis, and one day become a doctor. Conspicuously absent are references to Brinkley’s first marriage or his daughters from that union; the letter instead presents the son born to Brinkley’s second wife as the sole heir of a heroic family narrative. John Romulus—later John Richard—Brinkley (1885–1942) was born near Beta, North Carolina. After his mother, Sarah Candace Burnett, died when he was a child, he was reared by his stepmother, Sarah Mingus (“Aunt Sally”). As a young man he married Sally Margaret Wike in 1907; early biographical accounts list several children from this marriage, though Brinkley later left North Carolina and the marriage dissolved. In 1913 he married Minerva “Minnie” Jones and later fathered John Richard Brinkley III. Brinkley studied at unaccredited medical schools and acquired eclectic credentials before moving to Milford, Kansas, where he built a lucrative practice transplanting goat glands into men and touting his services over a powerful radio station. His medical claims made him famous and infamous in equal measure. By the late 1920s, when he wrote this letter, Brinkley had amassed considerable wealth and influence; he would later run unsuccessfully for governor of Kansas three times and eventually relocate his operations to Del Rio, Texas. The 1928 letter offers a self-fashioned origin story for the son who would inherit this legacy.