Mary Toft: How a Peasant Woman Gave Birth to Rabbits and Fooled All of England

September 1726. The town of Godalming in Surrey. The smell of dampness, unwashed bodies, and musty straw. In a dimly lit room lies a twenty-five-year-old woman. She is breathing heavily. And the local midwife John Howard is delivering her child with trembling hands. Only it is not a baby that is born. But a cat's paw. Then — part of a rabbit's head. And finally, a skinned animal carcass. Sounds like a madman's ravings? Absolutely. But this is how one of the wildest and most shameful pages in the history of British medicine began.

Meet Mary Toft. A simple, illiterate peasant woman, the wife of a clothier's apprentice. A woman who managed to fool not only provincial doctors but also the personal surgeons of King George I. Frankly, reading the archives of that time, you catch yourself thinking: how could scientists believe this? But they believed. And even wrote scientific treatises in defense of this absurdity.

Anatomy of Deception and the Power of Autosuggestion

A month before these events, Mary, being pregnant, had a miscarriage. The life of the poor in 18th-century England was generally not romantic — constant hunger, dirt, hard work. Later, she would tell the doctors a tearful story. They say she was working in the field, saw a rabbit, passionately wanted to eat it, but couldn't catch it. And at night she dreamed of these fluffy animals in a cabbage field. And here is the result - the womb began to produce rabbits.

John Howard, the very same local midwife, delivered about fifteen dead rabbits from Mary in a month. And these were not whole animals, but a terrible constructor: half a rabbit, cat's paws, a piece of eel. Instead of calling a priest or sending the patient to an insane asylum, Howard began sending letters to medical luminaries in London. He preserved fragments of animals in alcohol and invited colleagues to personally verify the miracle.

Why did he do it? It's simple. At that time, the theory of "maternal impression" reigned in medicine. It was believed that a strong emotion or fright of a pregnant woman could physically change the fetus. Scared of a mouse - the child will have a birthmark. Wanted rabbit meat - well, you understand. What seems like obscurantism to us today was then advanced science. Doctors wanted to believe in a miracle, because it confirmed their book theories.

The Royal Court Enters the Game

Rumors reached the palace. King George I, intrigued to the extreme, sends his court anatomist, Nathaniel St. Andre, to Surrey. This man was considered a star. A brilliant surgeon, snob, intellectual. And this intellectual, having arrived at Mary Toft, personally accepts another portion of rabbit entrails from her.

St. Andre was delighted. He found rabbits in a woman's womb - and it smelled of world fame. He immediately took the samples to London and presented them to the king. Moreover, he wrote and published a forty-page treatise "A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits". London went crazy. People stopped buying rabbit meat. On the streets, there was only talk about the woman from Godalming. Newspapers printed cartoons, and poets wrote obscene poems.

But doubts were already in the air. The German surgeon Cyriacus Ahlers, who was also sent by the king, turned out to be more skeptical. He noticed that the pieces of rabbits that he took for analysis had been cut with a knife. And in the stomach of one of the "newborn" animals, he found hay and grain. How could a rabbit eat hay while in a woman's womb? Rhetorical question.

Anatomy of Failure

The king demanded that Mary be brought to London. She was housed in the baths of Leicester House, where she was under round-the-clock surveillance. The best minds in Britain gathered at her bedside. And then something terrible happened - the rabbits stopped being born. Mary complained of pain, simulated contractions, but the miracle did not happen.

The ending of the story was ridiculously banal. On December 4, the porter of the baths was caught red-handed: he was trying to bring a dead rabbit into Mary's room. He was interrogated, and he confessed that Mary's sister-in-law had bribed him. But Mary herself continued to deny it. She held on until Sir Richard Manningham — one of the most authoritative doctors of the time — lost patience.

Manningham told her directly: if she didn't tell the truth, he would immediately perform a painful operation on her uterus. Without anesthesia, of course - it simply did not exist then. Perhaps this was the most effective argument in the history of gynecology. Mary broke down. She confessed everything.

The truth was disgusting and physiological. Mary bought rabbits, dismembered them, and... placed them inside herself. She endured hellish pain and the risk of blood poisoning for one purpose - to receive a pension from the king as a "unique medical phenomenon." Poverty pushes people to such madness.

Aftertaste of Shame

Mary Toft was sent to Bridewell Prison for fraud. However, she was released a few months later. To try her publicly would mean once again ridiculing British medicine. She returned to her Surrey and died in obscurity many years later.

But the careers of doctors collapsed with a deafening crash. Nathaniel St. Andre lost his place at court, patients, and reputation. Until the end of his days, he did not eat rabbit meat - even the sight of this meat caused him a nervous tic. The British medical community spent decades washing away this shame.

You know, we often laugh at the naivety of people in the past. We consider ourselves smarter because we have the Internet, MRI, and evidence-based medicine. But the story of Mary Toft is not a story about stupidity. This is a story about how much we want to believe in what confirms our picture of the world. The scientists of the 18th century wanted so much to prove their theory that they were blinded. They looked at a rabbit cut with a knife and saw a miracle of nature.

And if I'm honest, looking at modern fakes that spread across the network in millions of copies, I'm not sure that we have changed so much. Except that no one gives birth to rabbits anymore. At least for now.