The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

On September 27, 1726, a field worker named Mary Toft, of Godalming in Surrey, told the local surgeon John Howard she had gone into labor. What he extracted that day, and over the following weeks, was a series of cat parts, eel pieces, and — increasingly — pieces of skinned rabbit. By early November Howard was writing letters to London claiming she was producing a rabbit a day.

George I dispatched two investigators. Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household, arrived on November 15 and pronounced himself convinced. So did Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales. Five days later Cyriacus Ahlers, a more cautious royal surgeon, examined the same woman and noticed the rabbit specimens had been cut with a blade and contained grains of straw and dung pellets — signs they had been butchered, not born.

The ruse only held because Toft had recently miscarried, leaving her cervix accessible to whatever her husband and sister-in-law brought home from the market. Once she was moved to a London bagnio for closer observation, the supply chain broke. On December 4 a porter named Thomas Howard was caught trying to smuggle a live rabbit into her room.

Toft confessed three days later, on December 7.

The timing was catastrophic for St. André. He had rushed a 40-page pamphlet into print on December 3 — A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets — staking his reputation four days before Toft admitted everything. William Hogarth caricatured him that month as one of the Cunicularii, the rabbit-doctors. He kept his title but lost his standing at court, and reportedly never ate rabbit again.

Toft was charged with fraud, briefly jailed, and released on April 8, 1727. She went home to Godalming, had a daughter the next year, and died in 1763. Her London obituary ran alongside the aristocrats.