by James C. Clar.
I make no claim that the following tale is factually or historically accurate. The only truth I aspire to here is narrative truth; which is, of course, the most important truth of all. My sole aim is speculation in service of a desire to make a good story even better …
We will begin, then, with a name. As we shall see, even that may not be as reliable a starting point as one might assume.
There are men whose biographies resist chronology, as though time itself resists wholly verifying their existence. Francis Tumblety was such a man. Born in Ireland in 1833 (or 1830, or in some other year not recorded), he would later assert that his true origin lay not in a small rural town but in an unnamed infirmary where destiny first allowed him to be mistaken for a physician. The records disagree, which is only fitting.
Tumblety traveled under numerous names, the most durable being Dr. Francis Tumblety. No document of which I am aware has survived to conclusively explain how he acquired the title. At other times he was Frank Townsend. He was, in turn, a patriot, an anti-Catholic agitator, and an itinerant medical practitioner. One police inventory, compiled by a young constable whose handwriting deteriorates noticeably, lists jars of preserved female organs found in Tumblety’s possession. Each jar was labeled not with a given nor a surname, but with a location. Whether these cities indicate where his ‘donors’ hailed from, the scene of crimes committed or some more esoteric classification system devised by the doctor himself is unclear. I prefer to believe the latter … or none of the above.
Tumblety lectured against medicine while selling cures. He denounced doctors while mimicking their practices … and their fees. His public harangues against Rome were attended mostly by Catholics, who left unenlightened but nevertheless entertained. His enemies accused him of fraud; his supporters charged him with the crime of brilliance. Neither faction produced evidence sufficient to silence the other.
The career of one Dr. John Blackburn intersects with Tumblety’s life at several improbable but narratively quite intriguing angles. (The fact that Trumblety used the name Blackburn as an alias may strike the incredulous as more than mere coincidence). Blackburn himself was demonstrably a physician, which immediately complicates – or improves – our story. During the Civil War, he was arrested for attempting to spread yellow fever in the cities of the North. In my rendering of this saga, the charge appeared so elaborate and so bizarre that even the prosecution – not to mention the jury – found it dubious. The case relied on a trunk of linens, the testimony of a prostitute, and a theory of contagion discredited by the medical and scientific establishment of the day. Blackburn was eventually acquitted.
His name emerges later in England, where he practiced quietly and without scandal. Not all quiet lives, however, are quiet by accident.
Tumblety, too, crossed the Atlantic. He was drawn to London, or so it is claimed, by its climate, which he found hostile and therefore invigorating. In the autumn of 1888, he was arrested on charges of “gross indecency.” It was a time when the city was preoccupied with the infamous Whitechapel Murders. Police memoranda describe him as “a suspicious character,” a phrase that gestures broadly while meaning nothing or, perhaps, everything. Despite his well-known misogyny and his outré habit of collecting female uteri, Trumbelty was released on bail and fled the country. His flight may indicate guilt, innocence, or simply a renewed desire to travel.
One marginal note in an obscure Scotland Yard file speculates, without further elaboration, on Tumblety’s acquaintance with a “Dr. B.” The initial is later underlined, then, still later, struck through. It is unknown whether the correction reflects subsequent developments in the case, deliberate obfuscation or something else entirely.
Trumbelty and Blackburn were men who shared certain habits. Both trafficked in disease, whether as menace, metaphor, or commercial opportunity. Both were accused of crimes whose mechanisms taxed the science of their day. Both relied, at critical moments, on the inevitable incompetence of institutions. Whether they ever met remains unproven; whether they needed to is matter for debate or literary invention.
Tumblety died in 1903 and was buried in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Rochester, New York. His gravestone, however, records him under a name that is not quite his own. The inscription reads Tumuelty, an older Irish spelling of the family name. The name is attested elsewhere but was abandoned during his lifetime. Some take this as a gesture of ancestral fidelity; my conceit is to allege it as a final act of misdirection. The stone identifies a man who was indeed real but who nevertheless is not quite identical to the Francis Tumblety of imagination.
This orthographic divergence has inspired theories of varying sobriety. One proposes that Tumblety reverted to the original spelling in death, having exhausted his aliases in life. Another suggests that the man beneath the stone is a substitute, or no one at all. Mine is a more prosaic view. It holds that history, like medicine, is prone to clerical error … and that Tumblety relied on this.
It may be that neither Tumblety nor Blackburn committed the crimes attributed to them. It may be that both did, in ways that history lacks the facility to describe. They therefore occupied that liminal territory where biography and accusation are most faithfully served by narrative invention.
Borges reminds us, though I doubt he ever actually wrote this, that infamy is not the result of deeds but of documentation. Tumblety appears to have understood this instinctively. He arranged his life so that every fact would require a footnote, and every footnote would contain a contradiction.
In the end, Tumblety’s greatest achievement – like that of Blackburn’s – may not have been what he did or did not do, but the doubt he so carefully cultivated around himself. History, obliged to record him, does so under a name that is both correct and incorrect at the same time.