More about Doctor Tumblety - New facts.
(From the Rochester Union, 9th.)
As Tumblety resided in Rochester many years, and is well known here to almost all our citizens, we need not tell them that the stories floating about in the newspapers are erroneous. His name is J. H. Tumblety, and Blackburn is an alias he has assumed somewhere. His mother resides here still, and he has other relatives, all respectable citizens. He is of Irish origin, and no half breed, and has no Indian blood. He will be remembered by many, some fifteen years or more since, as a peddler of books upon the cars, and subsequently in other avocations, not long in any one here in town. He once had an office in Smith's Block, where he went by the name of Philip Sternberg, and treated a certain class of diseases. When one H. J. Lyons, an "Indian Herb Doctor", had an office over the Post Office, Tumblety used to be with him, and he probably picked up the information requisite to start him in his profession there. When ready to go abroad as a full fledged "yarb" Doctor, he procured a certificate of character, signed by a dozen or twenty of our most respectable citizens, who gave their names not knowing that he intended to practice medicine. Tumblety went to Toronto and there put out his shingles as a physician, and published the names he had procured here. When the papers came back those who had signed the certificate of character were much annoyed.
Subsequently Tumblety was arrested at Toronto on the instigation of the regular faculty as a quack, and he was taken before a court. There he produced some kind of a certificate which he had obtained from a Philadelphia College, and escaped with a fine of twenty pounds, which he paid, and resumed practice with considerable eclat. Subsequently he had a difficulty in Montreal, which cost him a considerable sum to get out, but all tended to give him the notoriety he sought, and he probably made a great deal of money by being prosecuted by the "regulars." He afterwards figured at Buffalo and other cities along the borders.
When the war broke out he appeared at Washington, and was once gazetted as a surgeon on the staff of General McClellan, but this was subsequently denied and explained. Tumblety has not been here that we can hear of in three or four years. Reports state that he was arrested in St. Louis. He will probably get notoriety enough out of his last arrest to gratify his ambition in that direction for a lifetime, if he is able to show that he is innocent. Those who knew him best say that he was no politician, and they think he would not be likely to engage in such a diabolical scheme as that in which his man servant, Herold, was concerned. This is, we believe, a truthful sketch of "Dr. Tumblety" so far as it goes.
