In September 1726, Mary Toft went into labour.
This should not have been particularly remarkable. Mary was a 24-year-old labourers wife from Godalming in Surrey. She had already had children and knew perfectly well what giving birth involved.
What emerged from Mary on this occasion, however, was apparently not a baby. It was bits of animal. And thigs were about to get a whole lot stranger.
Within weeks, Mary Toft would become one of the most famous women in England. Doctors would travel to Surrey to examine her. Representatives of King George I would become involved. Learned men would argue over what was happening inside her body. And Mary?
Well, Mary would apparently give birth to rabbits. Lots of rabbits.
It’s tempting from this point to tell the story as a tale about spectacular Georgian stupidity, but it isn’t. At least it isn’t only that.
Mary had been pregnant earlier that year and, according to the account she later gave, she miscarried but continued to experience symptoms afterwards. Then came the extraordinary deliveries.
Local surgeon and man-midwife John Howard was summoned, and what he encountered was sufficiently bizarre that he began sending reports to other medical men. Mary was producing animal material. Accounts vary as the story developed, but contemporary reports included rabbit parts and, at various times, pieces supposedly resembling a cat and other tissue. Eventually the story settled predominantly on rabbits.
By November, Howard was reporting a succession of extraordinary births. News spread. And that is where things really got out of hand.
One of the men drawn to Godalming was Nathaniel St André, a surgeon and anatomist to king George I.
St André examined Mary and what she had supposedly delivered, and was convinced that something genuinely extraordinary had occurred. He was not relying merely on Mary’s word. There were bodies, or more accurately, pieces of bodies. Animal remains were apparently being removed from Mary’s vagina in front of witnesses.
This part matters. Nobody seriously believed that Mary had simply announced “I’ve given birth to a rabbit!” and an assortment of eminent physicians had nodded thoughtfully and written it down. They were attempting to explain physical evidence apparently produced from her body. St André subsequently published an account defending what he had witnessed. Other medical men were considerably less convinced.
Cyriacus Ahlers, another surgeon sent to investigate, became suspicious. James Douglas, a respected physician and anatomist, was sceptical too. Sir Richard Manningham would eventually keep Mary under observation and record the events surrounding the collapse of the whole story.
So why was anyone prepared to consider rabbit birth possible in the first place?
Part of the answer lies in an idea which sounds peculiar now but was taken seriously within early eighteenth-century discussions of reproduction: maternal imagination.
The basic principle was that a powerful experience suffered by a pregnant woman – particularly a fright, obsession, craving or disturbing sight – might physically affect the developing child. Birth defects could therefore be explained by something the mother had seen or experienced during pregnancy.
Mary’s story fitted beautifully. She said that while pregnant she had been weeding in a field when rabbits appeared. She chased them. Afterwards, she developed an overwhelming longing for rabbit meat and dreamed about rabbits. Then came the miscarriage. And later, the rabbits.
To people already familiar with the supposed power of maternal imagination, this was not merely a random story about a woman producing wildlife. It had a theoretical mechanism. An incorrect one certainly, but one that existed before Mary Toft ever entered the story.
That is one of the things historical hoaxes do particularly well.
They rarely invent an entirely new world. They exploit the world their audience already inhabits.
There was another reason the case attracted serious attention.
The eighteenth century was a period in which medicine – particularly the study of reproduction and childbirth – was changing rapidly. Male practitioners were increasingly entering a realm traditionally dominated by women and midwives. Anatomists wanted to understand conception, foetal development and birth. Observation and physical evidence were becoming increasingly important. Mary Toft presented an irresistible problem.
If what was happening was genuine, existing ideas about human reproduction were incomplete. And if it wasn’t genuine, somebody had somehow managed to place animal remains inside a woman repeatedly, sometimes under the observation of medical men. Either way, there was something to investigate, so Mary was eventually taken to London and lodged at Lacey’s Bagnio in Leicester Fields, where she could be examined more closely.
By this time, Mary was a sensation. People wanted to see her. Doctors wanted to examine her. Pamphlets began to appear and newspapers followed developments. And London’s satirists sharpened their knives. But under close supervision, something a little inconvenient happened. Mary stopped producing rabbits.
And then came the discovery that effectively ended the whole affair.
Enter Thomas, the porter.
Thomas Howard was caught attempting to smuggle a rabbit into Mary’s quarters. He claimed that Mary’s sister-in-law had asked him to obtain it.
The implications were fairly obvious, so Manningham confronted Mary.
At first she resisted, but according his published diary, pressure increased and Mary was warned that the consequences might become extremely serious. If it were believed that rabbits had developed inside her, physicians might consider performing dangerous examinations to discover how such a thing had happened.
On 7 December 1726, Mary confessed. Her account of precisely how the fraud began changed, and this is where her neat little story begins to unravel.
Mary said another woman had persuaded her to participate after her miscarriage, telling her that she could make money from the deception. Animal material was introduced into Mary’s body and subsequently extracted as though she were giving birth to it. Rabbit parts were used.
And Mary endured it. Repeatedly.
I think that detail deserves rather more consideration than it usually receives. Somewhere during the following three centuries, Mary Toft became the funny rabbit woman. She appears in lists of ridiculous medical mishaps and mistakes and unbelievable historical facts. Her story is usually illustrated with rabbits and accompanied by some variation of:
“Doctors actually believed her!”
But look at Mary herself.
She was a working class woman in her twenties who had recently suffered a miscarriage. To sustain the following fraud she repeatedly had pieces of dead animals inserted into her vagina – some of which appear to have remained inside her body long enough to become discoloured or decomposed. She was subjected to repeated intimate examinations by male doctors. She was transported away from her home to London. She was questioned and threatened.
And once the deception collapsed, the powerful men involved could publish explanations, defend their reputations and argue about who had believed what and when. Mary became the fraud.
That doesn’t make her innocent. She participated in a deliberate deception. But it does make the traditional picture of Mary Toft as some extraordinarily cunning peasant woman single-handedly running rings around the finest medical minds in Britain rather difficult to sustain.
She wasn’t working alone.
Her husband Joshua was implicated in contemporary satire. His sister Margaret was associated with the preparation or supply of rabbits. John Howard’s role has been debated ever since the events themselves, although proving exactly who knew what – and at what stage – is considerably harder.
The surviving evidence presents something messier than a simple confidence trick. A group of people participated. Others may have assisted. Some medical men believed. Others doubted. Some changed their minds. And everyone had something to lose when the truth emerged.
Nathaniel St André had perhaps the most spectacular fall. He had publicly supported the rabbit births and published his account of them. Once the fraud was exposed, his professional reputation suffered badly.
The medical profession more generally became a gift to satirists.
William Hogarth produced Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation in December 1726. The engraving mercilessly depicts the assembled medical men around Mary, reducing an affair that had briefly attracted royal attention and serious scientific enquiry to grotesque farce.
Mary herself was taken into custody and held at Westminster Bridewell. Yet prosecuting her presented difficulties.
What exactly was the crime?
She had caused enormous public embarrassment and deceived medical men, but turning that into a straightforward criminal charge was another matter and eventually she was released without trial. She returned to Surrey.
For a woman who had briefly become one of the most notorious women in Britain, the rest of her life was comparatively ordinary. She died in 1763.
The rabbits, however, refused to die with her.
Nearly three centuries later, Mary Toft remains famous, and perhaps we have all been laughing at the wrong part of the story. Because the remarkable thing isn’t that eighteenth century doctors were stupid enough to believe that a woman could give birth to rabbits. Several of the doctors didn’t. The remarkable thing is that the deception created enough apparently medical evidence to make intelligent people stop and ask whether something they considered impossible might have actually happened.
Some investigated and were fooled. Some investigated and weren’t.
Mary’s pregnancy had been constructed around ideas that some people in 1726 already considered plausible – that’s what makes it such a good hoax. Not because everyone who encountered it was an idiot. But because for a few extraordinary weeks in 1726, Mary Toft and whoever was helping her managed to create just enough evidence to make some very clever people wonder:
“What if..?”
