Francis Tumblety

Francis Tumblety (c.1833 – 28 May 1903) was an Irish-born American medical quack who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada. He was an eccentric self-promoter and was often in trouble with the law. He has been put forward as a suspect for the notorious and still unsolved Jack the Ripper murder spree in Whitechapel, London, in 1888.

According to the 1850 United States census, Tumblety was born in Ireland. His parents, James and Margaret Tumuelty (so spelled on their tombstone), along with his 10 brothers and sisters, emigrated to Rochester, New York, a few years after his birth. By the age of 17 he was selling books, which were possibly pornographic, along the Erie Canal between Rochester and Buffalo. He then found brief employment as a cleaner at the Lispenard Hospital, in Rochester, which had a dubious medical reputation for performing gynaecological operations and "cures" for sexual temptation. He left home around 17, and did not return for 10 years.

Tumblety set himself up in business, initially in Detroit. He claimed to be a "great physician", but was commonly perceived as a quack. He sold patent medicines such as "Tumblety's Pimple Destroyer" and "Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills", and gained a reputation for his eccentric, ostentatious clothes, which were frequently of a military nature. According to Tumblety, by 1857 he was practicing medicine in Canada, before moving to New York and Washington, D.C., where he claims to have first been introduced to Abraham Lincoln. Tumblety's medicinal approach was based on herbal remedies over mineral "poisons" (mercury) or surgical techniques. He was connected to the death of one of his patients in Boston, but escaped prosecution.

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