MOUNT VRNON — Everything is connected. It’s a good thing to remember when life gets tough and you feel isolated by its difficulties. No matter how remote one may feel, there’s not that great a distance between any individual and everything else going on in the world.
As I’ve gotten older, it’s an exercise I’ve undertaken more frequently, tracing lines of connection.
This week, I’d like to share an example that demonstrates how startling these connections can be. It shows the distance between Knox County and the infamous Jack the Ripper case is not as far as one might expect.
“Jack the Ripper” is the nickname of the unknown serial killer who terrorized the East End of London, England, in the late 19th century. Over a relatively short period of time, the madman attacked and murdered a number of victims. His identity was never settled, and no one was arrested for his crimes.
Over the years, that has led to a cottage industry of researchers who have tried to evaluate any number of suspects, from possible perpetrators to absurd conspiracy theories.
One of the relatively more credible suspects that has fascinated true crime experts was a fellow by the name of Dr. Francis Tumblety. Tumblety was born in Ireland in 1833, but his family escaped the devastating Irish Potato Famine by fleeing to the U.S. By the age of 17, Tumblety was traveling up and down the Erie Canal in upstate New York, selling medical guides.
He later set himself up as a purveyor of patent medicines, and traveled all over the U.S. and, later, England. Tumblety narrowly escaped prosecution in London when one of his patients died after taking Tumblety’s “herbal remedy.”
But that wasn’t the only reason he high-tailed it out of London. He also left because the London police were starting to show a lot of interest in the notoriously eccentric “doctor,” who rented a cheap room in Whitechapel, the very neighborhood Jack the Ripper made his own.
Researchers have pointed out the interesting coincidence that the killings stopped around the same time Tumblety returned to the States, and the fact that Tumblety had been arrested for a morals crime while he was in London. But the researchers have failed to connect Tumblety to any U.S. crimes of the period.
The morals charge the campy doctor was arrested for involved another man, not a woman. While that doesn’t necessarily rule him out as Jack the Ripper, there is another simple fact: Whoever Jack the Ripper was, he was someone who could blend into a crowd and disappear, time and time again.
Francis Tumblety never blended in anywhere, as the accompanying photo will attest.
So, how did this quack come up with his spiel?
Like anyone else, he learned his trade by emulating a master. Doc Tumblety’s muse was one of the kings of patent medicine in the mid-1800s, the self-styled Professor R.J. Lyons.
Rudolf Lyons was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, in South America in 1817, the son of Jewish traders of Dutch ancestry (whom he later passed off as French in his 1864 autobiography) Judah (whom he disguised as “Julius”) and Matje (whom he called “Mary”) Lyons.
This exotic background gave Lyons his claim to have learned secret South American native herbal cures in his youth.
Lyons came to the U.S. in the 1840s and began making a name for himself as a traveling patent medicine seller. He set up a base in Rochester, New York, around 1850. Young Francis Tumblety was impressed by this doctor, who referred to himself in newspaper ads as “the well-known and celebrated Indian herb doctor.”
Lyons took on the young Tumblety as a steward, teaching him the tricks of the patent medicine trade. After a few years, Tumblety set off on his own, first in Detroit and later in New York City, followed eventually by his ill-fated attempt to break into the London scene.
What does any of this have to do with Knox County?
Well, Professor Lyons built his career by advertising his services in newspapers and establishing a circuit route that he would regularly travel.
Newspaper ads show that in the 1860s and 1870s, Lyons was basing himself in Michigan, then traveling throughout the Midwest, hitting particular cities along the way. In central Ohio, his regular stops were Wooster, Mount Vernon (and Gambier), Delaware, Newark, and Columbus, hitting them all every month for two days each.
People who saw his ad could plan on meeting him at the Kenyon House in Gambier (or, a few years later, at the Lybrand Hotel in Mount Vernon) where he stayed when he came to the area.
Judging by one of his advertisements, the “professor” had an interesting diagnostic technique: “He discerns diseases BY THE EYE and by the lineament of countenance. He asks no questions, nor does he require invalids to explain their symptoms.”
In addition to treating head, throat, lungs, heart, liver, stomach, kidneys, bladder, blood, catarrh, fits of falling sickness, nervous derangements, and “all complicated, chronic complaints,” Professor Lyons points out his specialty thusly: “DISEASES OF WOMEN, old or young, married or single, are treated by the professor with the happiest of results.”
There you go. A doctor who gives happy endings was bound to be a hit.
On the other hand, one can pretty easily debunk the professor’s supposed ability to cure everything: His son William spent most of his life, from age 25 until his death nearly 40 years later, in a state asylum in Michigan.
When Doc Tumblety set up his own operation in 1855, he was also based in Detroit with Professor Lyons. It is very possible that Francis Tumblety accompanied Lyons on his tours of the Midwest, including Mount Vernon, first as an assistant, and later as a colleague in the 1850s.
What is known for certain is that Tumblety got his start by “borrowing” Lyon’s “Indian herb doctor” verbiage, and may even have sold the exact same tonics, directly sourced from Lyons himself.
While there are some serious problems with our medical systems these days, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we don’t have nearly as many quack “doctors” (read that as “fraudsters” for a more accurate assessment) running around peddling cures that contain more alcohol than your average liquor.
If we did have early visits by a notorious and potentially dangerous individual, we can all be glad he didn’t stick around.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take some elixir for my nervous derangements.
