In 1726, a Surrey Woman Convinced the King's Own Surgeons She Was Giving Birth to Rabbits

In late October of 1726, word reached the court of King George I that a woman in Godalming, a small market town in Surrey, had given birth to a rabbit. Then another. By the time anyone in London took the report seriously, she was up to nine. Her name was Mary Toft, she was twenty-five years old, illiterate, married to a journeyman clothier, and by all accounts an unremarkable woman living an unremarkable life — right up until the moment she began producing dead animals from her own body in front of the most respected medical men in the kingdom, and they believed her.

The local surgeon, John Howard, was the first person called to Toft's bedside. He had been told she'd suffered a miscarriage in a field after being startled by a rabbit she could not afford to buy and craved desperately — a detail that, under the medical theory of the day, mattered enormously. Howard arrived expecting an ordinary case and instead delivered what he understood to be the legs and torso of an animal. He kept coming back. Over the following weeks, Toft "delivered" parts of cats, the backbone of an eel, and a steady, escalating series of dead rabbits — eventually eleven of them, by Howard's own count, each one pickled in a jar and lined up on a shelf in his study like trophies of a discovery he was certain would make his career.

The Science That Made It Plausible

None of this happened in a vacuum of medical ignorance. Eighteenth-century obstetrics operated under a widely accepted framework called maternal impression theory: the belief that a pregnant woman's thoughts, frights, and unsatisfied longings could physically imprint themselves onto the body of the child she carried. A craving denied, a shock endured — these were thought capable of producing visible deformity, or in extreme cases, of transforming the pregnancy itself. Toft's account of being startled by a rabbit in a field while pregnant, and craving rabbit meat she had no money to buy, was not a story doctors found suspicious. It was a story that fit the science exactly as they understood it.

Howard's reports eventually reached Nathaniel St André, surgeon-anatomist to the royal household, who traveled to Surrey to see for himself and came away convinced. King George I, sufficiently intrigued, also dispatched Cyriacus Ahlers, a German surgeon attached to the court, to investigate independently. Toft was then brought to London and installed at a bagnio — a bathhouse used for medical observation — where she came under the direct attention of Sir Richard Manningham, one of the most respected man-midwives in the city. It is worth sitting with that lineup for a moment: by late November 1726, a woman from a small Surrey market town had the personal attention of the royal surgeon, a German court physician, and London's leading obstetric authority, all because she said she had given birth to rabbits, and none of them had yet found a reason good enough to say no.

The Porter and the Smallest Rabbit

Manningham was the first to grow openly doubtful. He had observed what he believed was a hog's bladder presented as evidence of delivery, and his suspicion hardened the longer Toft remained under direct, continuous observation at the bagnio without producing anything further. The case began to unravel from an unglamorous direction: a porter was caught attempting to smuggle a rabbit into the building, and under questioning admitted that Toft's sister-in-law, Margaret, had asked him specifically to procure the smallest rabbit he could find. It is, as far as smoking guns go, a remarkably mundane one — nobody photographed a confession or uncovered a diary. Someone simply noticed that a woman who was supposedly delivering rabbits from her own body kept needing other people to go buy her rabbits.

Manningham confronted Toft directly and, when she continued to insist on the truth of her story, threatened to perform an invasive exploratory surgical examination to determine whether her anatomy was in fact different from other women's. Toft confessed on the 7th of December, 1726, in a formal statement taken down by the physician James Douglas in the presence of a Justice of the Peace. She said a traveling woman had taught her the scheme, telling her it would ensure she would "never want as long as I liv'd." She implicated her mother-in-law and sister-in-law as accomplices in procuring and concealing the animals. Two days later she was charged as a "Notorious and Vile Cheat" and committed to Bridewell Prison, where she would spend four months while crowds gathered outside her cell to gawk at the woman who had fooled the King's own doctors.

The Men Who Believed Her Did Not Recover

Mary Toft made no money from the hoax and returned, eventually, to an unremarkable life in Surrey. The men who had vouched for her did not get off so easily. Nathaniel St André took out newspaper advertisements attempting to explain how he had been deceived, which only kept the story in circulation and his name attached to it; his standing as a royal surgeon never recovered. William Hogarth, then an ambitious young engraver building the satirical voice that would define his career, produced Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation — a print staging the entire affair as a kind of theater, Toft mid-performance, surrounded by the credulous experts who had traveled from London to watch her do it. It remains one of the sharpest pieces of evidence that the public understood exactly how absurd this was, even while it was happening.

Why You Should Think About This

It is tempting to read the Mary Toft affair as a story about gullible men and a clever woman who got the better of them for a few months in 1726, and there is some truth in that. But the more interesting version of the story is about how thoroughly the explanation fit the available science. St André, Howard, and the rest were not idiots being conned by an obviously impossible claim. They were trained professionals operating inside a medical framework — maternal impression theory — that gave a pregnant woman's fear and craving the power to alter the body of her child. Inside that framework, Toft's account was not a flight of fancy. It was a plausible clinical narrative, delivered by someone in evident distress, that happened to be entirely fabricated. The hoax worked not because the men around her were fools, but because the science of the day had already built the room she walked into.

The case is widely credited by historians of medicine as one of the events that hastened the decline of maternal impression theory and pushed obstetric practice toward demanding direct physical evidence rather than deferring to a patient's account, however sincerely or symptomatically delivered. Toft, whatever her motives — desperation, opportunity, the promise that she would "never want" again — briefly made the most credentialed medical minds in England believe whatever she needed them to believe. That is, in its own way, a more impressive accomplishment than giving birth to seventeen rabbits would have been.