Mary Toft was a 25-year-old field labourer’s wife in Godalming, Surrey — poor, illiterate, and recently miscarried. In September 1726 she began, with the help of her mother-in-law Ann Toft (a midwife), to appear to give birth to animal parts: first fragments of a cat, then, refined by practice, dead rabbits, delivered piece by piece over the following weeks.
The prevailing medical theory of maternal impression made the story just plausible: it held that a pregnant woman’s imagination could shape her foetus. Toft supplied the required backstory — startled by a rabbit while weeding, she had craved rabbit meat for months.
The experts arrive
Local man-midwife John Howard examined her, was converted, and wrote to the great men of London. Nathaniel St André — Swiss-born surgeon-anatomist to the royal household of George I — arrived in November, witnessed a delivery, dissected the rabbit parts, and declared the births genuine, rushing out a pamphlet: A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets.
The king sent a second observer, the German surgeon Cyriacus Ahlers, who noticed what belief had hidden: the rabbit lungs floated in water — they had breathed air. Some parts showed knife cuts; one rabbit’s droppings contained hay, straw, and corn. Ahlers reported fraud.
With London split, Toft was brought to a bagnio in Leicester Fields for round-the-clock observation under the eminent obstetrician Sir Richard Manningham. Cut off from supply, she produced nothing. Then a porter confessed he had been caught smuggling a rabbit into her room at her sister-in-law’s request. Threatened by Manningham with “painful experiments” to resolve the question surgically, Toft confessed on 7 December 1726: the parts had been inserted manually.
The reckoning
Toft was jailed for months as the courts puzzled over what to charge her with; she was eventually released without trial and returned to Godalming obscurity, dying in 1763.
The believers fared worse. St André lost his royal favour and died in poverty decades later. Satire buried the profession: Hogarth engraved the scene (Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation); ballads and pamphlets — one attributed to Jonathan Swift’s circle — ran for months; rabbit dinners were reportedly struck from fashionable menus.
The episode became a standing lesson in medical credulity — the case where England’s finest anatomists were beaten by a labourer’s wife, a midwife, and a supply of dead rabbits — and it helped push man-midwifery towards the sceptical, evidence-minded obstetrics of the later eighteenth century.