Francis Tumblety (c. 1833 – May 28, 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 unsolved Jack the Ripper murder spree in Whitechapel, London, in 1888. Early life 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, immigrated 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 left home around 17, and did not return for 10 years. He was briefly employed as a cleaner at "Lispenard's Hospital" in Rochester. 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 claimed 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. In 1858 he returned to Rochester apparently a rich man, making an ostentatious display of his wealth and new social standing, and claiming that it had been achieved through patenting of his medicinal cures. 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 assassination of Abraham Lincoln, because the police believed that he was an associate of David Herold, who was captured with John Wilkes Booth. Tumblety denied any association with Herold, and there was nothing to tie him to the plot, so Tumblety was released without charge