Career
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. Federal tax records show he was in Maryland in early 1863, but he soon moved to St. Louis, Missouri, living at 50 Olive Street.
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.
Tumblety appeared to revel in denouncing all women, but reserved a special hatred for prostitutes; he blamed his misogyny on a failed marriage to a prostitute. In Washington, D.C., he displayed a collection of preserved female reproductive organs to his guests at an all-male dinner party, and proudly boasted that they came from "every class of woman".
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