Raynors HCA 2019-09
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/26/2019
Booklet, “Kidnapping of Dr. Tumblety. By Order of the Secretary of War of the U.S., Dr. Francis Tumbley, The Indian Herb Doctor ....”, written by Trumbley, Cicinnati, 1866, 82pp., 5” x 7-1/2,” detached separate covers. Trumbley defends himself. One of the periods most colorful figure, he 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. On May 5, 1865, he was arrested in St. Louis and taken to Washington on orders of the Secretary of War for alleged complicity in the Abraham Lincoln assassination, simply because he was an acquaintance, which he denied, of David Herold, who was captured with John Wilkes Booth. There was nothing to tie him to the plot, however, and Tumblety was released without charge on May 30. Already notorious in the United States for his self-promotion and previous brushes with the law, Tumblety's 1888 arrest in London was reported in The New York Times as being connected to the Ripper murders. Tumblety was mentioned as a Ripper suspect by former Detective Chief Inspector John George Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police Service in a letter to journalist and author George R. Sims Fascinating person.
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