Tumblety In 1881

[Howard Brown]

Due to site maintainance going on at Photobucket, I can't load the articles I've collected tonight....or yet, tonight.

They'll be here a.s.a.p.

[Howard Brown]

New Orleans Times-Picayune
March 25, 1881
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[Howard Brown]

New Orleans Times-Picayune
March 30, 1881
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[Howard Brown]

New Orleans Times-Picayune
April 12, 1881
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[Howard Brown]

Leavenworth Times
Leavenworth, Kansas
May 25, 1881
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[Howard Brown]

New York Times
June 29, 1881
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[Howard Brown]

New Orleans Item
March 25, 1881
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[Wolf Vanderlinden]

This might be the reason why Tumblety sued the N.Y. Times:

The New York Times
25 March, 1881.

A DECORATED PICKPOCKET.

NEW-ORLEANS, March 24. — Dr. Francis Tumblety, who wears fine jewelry and exhibits half a dozen decorations, which he claims to have received from the crowned heads of Europe, was arrested this evening for picking the pocket of a Government clerk, and is now locked up in the calaboose.

Doesn't seem like much but the good doctor was thin skinned and his name was his business. Nobody wants their cancer cured by a "dip," decorated or not.

Wolf.

[Howard Brown]

That's exactly right, Wolf...

If anyone was going to tarnish Tumblety's reputation, it was going to be him and him alone.

[Howard Brown]

By the way, Wolf....

The other day one of the Tumblety-driven researchers stated that Tumblety had a fascination with blood....because of a display he had set up in which a red liquid was used to represent blood. Smart idea....green wouldn't have worked.

Anyway....I suppose that anyone who used red liquid to represent blood in a medical display can now be said to have a fascination with blood. Doctors, even quack ones, would be the most likely people outside of those in the teaching profession to use red liquid to represent blood.

10 pounds of it in a five pound bag, brudda.

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Hi Howard.

Yeah, I saw that. There is a mountain of evidence to disprove it, but that doesn’t stop the faithful from preaching the Word of Tumblety.

Tumblety was a practitioner of Thomsonian and Eclectic medicine (today this would be akin to being an herbalists or homeopath) and believed that herbs and nature could cure all ills. Thomsonian medicine thought that you had to purge the body of toxins using natural purgatives, laxatives, enemas, and just plain sweat. They used things like cayenne pepper, and we know that Tumblety used cayenne, to raise the body’s temperature to restore heat, which was seen as an important ingredient to good health.

Many people in the 19th century preferred Thomsonian “natural” and gentle cures to the oft times toxic medicine, and bloody surgery, of regular doctors. This is how Tumblety made his money: by promising no blood and no pain. As one of Tumblety’s ads ran:

We use such Balms as have no strife
With Nature or the Laws of Life;
With blood our hands we never stain
Nor Poison men to ease their pain.

Since there are many examples of Tumblety’s stated loathing of blood and surgery, and no examples proving that he was fascinated by blood, stating that he was is an act of delusion masquerading as theory. But that’s just me. I actually think facts and evidence are important.

Wolf.

[Howard Brown]

But that’s just me. I actually think facts and evidence are important.
-Wolf-

Oh man, you're such a spoil sport