From The Anatomist Dissected, Or the Man-Midwife finely brought to Bed by ‘Lemuel Gulliver’ (1726)
In November 1726 Mary Toft, a young woman from Godalming in Surrey, began ‘giving birth’ to parts of animals – a rabbit’s liver, the legs of a cat – and then to entire baby rabbits. She claimed to have chased two rabbits in a field one day and from then on only to have thought about rabbits until she began producing them. Ever more distinguished mid-wives and doctors were sent to examine her, including Nathanael St Andre, Swiss anatomist to the Royal Household sent by King George I, who wrote a forty-page treatise on the phenomenon; none could find anything amiss. William Hogarth made an engraving called ‘The Cunicularii, Or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation’; the ‘Rabbit Lady’, as she was known, was talked about in all of London’s salons and written about by every gossip from Jonathan Swift to Lord Hervey. But by the seventeenth ‘birth’ of what sometimes looked like fully-grown dead rabbits, suspicions had begun to be aroused. Finally, the physician Sir Richard Manningham exposed her fraud, and Toft confessed that she had staged the whole thing hoping to profit from her celebrity. The ‘Rabbit Lady’ was sent to Bridewell, but soon fell into obscurity – and poverty, judging from the fact that she faced charges for handling stolen goods in 1740 – and died in 1763. These extracts are from an anonymous satirical pamphlet attacking St Andre’s credulity in the affair; he was forced to apologize publicly for his credulity after Toft’s confession.
For, to begin with his narative; a true surgeon, one, I mean, orderly and properly educated in that worthy profession, would never have suffer’d his curiosity to be at all alarm’d by seeing a letter from Guildford, which mention’d a woman’s being deliver’d of five rabbits : suppose one were to see a letter from Battersea, importing that a woman there had been deliver’d of five cucumbers, or indeed a hundred letters, would that lead a man of sense to believe any thing, but, either that the people who wrote those letters had been grossly impos’d upon themselves, or intended to impose upon him. Either of these two things may, and do happen every day; but it was never known, that ever any creature brought forth any one creature of a species in all respects different from it self, much less five or seventeen such creatures; for which therefore, a man of common sense, much more a penetrating and quicksighted anatomist, should look upon all such letters with the utmost contempt.
Yet it was the sight of two or three such letters (and those flagrant with most conspicuous tokens of imposture) which induc’d Mr St André, at this time of the year, to take two journeys to Guildford, in order to enquire into the truth of what, in nature, it was impossible should be true. However, to Guildford he came for the first time; where I shall attend him a while, and watch his motions, perhaps to a better purpose than he did those of the rabbit-bearing woman: for tho’, with all his skill he was not able to detect her fraud, I hope with very little of mine to display his ignorance.
In the first place, how stupid must he have been, not to suspect a trick, when Howard, upon being sent for, came and acquainted him, that the woman was actually in labour of the fifteenth rabbit. This puts me in mind of what, above six and forty years ago, I learn’d at school; where the sagacity of old Simo1 in the Andria of Terence appears, to the utter shame of our modern St Andrians: the old gentleman had reason to suspect fraud from the known character of a crafty knave he had to deal with; and whose business it was to make him believe, that a certain lady was just then in labour: accordingly as they approach her house, she contrives to be in one of her labour pains, and cries out so loud that the old man must needs hear it; upon which, I remember, he says, with much humour and judgment, Hui tam cito? ridiculum, postquam ante ostium me audivit stare, approperat. Non sat commode divisa sunt temporibus tibi, Dave, haec. For thus, had he been credulous enough to go to Guildford to inquire into this cheat, he would have said, in plain English, upon the like occasion, What a pox, is she so quick? this is the damn’dest joke that ever was: the moment she hears I am arrived, she falls into one of her labour pains: ah, Howard! this was not well tim’d of you by any means.
But, to return from this digression, if the woman was actually in labour of the fifteenth rabbit, why should Mr Howard leave her, and stay with Mr St André till they call’d him again, when she was said to be in one of her labour pains? Here a wise man would have smelt a rat instead of a rabbit: and much more, when this woman in labour pains, and who had been in labour some time then, nay fourteen times before, was found dress’d in her stays, and sitting on the bed-side; and that not for want [of] help to put her to bed; for there were several women near her. A man must have a spritely genius for swallowing imposture that was not stagger’d at such an appearance. This sure it was that prompted Mr St André to wave all such reflections, and proceed immediately to examine her; when, tho’ by his own confession, he did not find the parts prepar’d for her labour, (which was another plain indication of the roguery) yet he was weak enough to wait for the coming on of fresh pains, and in three or four minutes after to think he deliver’d her of the intire trunk, strip’d of its skin, of a rabbit about four months growth (he meant to have said, of an animal of the size and figure of a rabbit of four months growth) in which the heart and lungs were contain’d, with the diaphragm intire. Well, what does my gentleman then? He instantly cut of a piece of them, and tried them in water; in which they swam, and when they were press’d to the bottom, rose again. Now, it being notoriously the property of the lungs of a foetus to sink, and of a creature which has been some time brought forth alive to swim, in water; what but an absolute prepossession in favour of this filthy miracle, or a consummate ignorance in these matters could have hinder’d any sober inquirer from being determin’d in relation to this cheat, by the foregoing trial. Yet Mr St André never boggles at this, nor at the impossibility of the trunk of such a creature’s (suppos’d but just before to be alive) being stript of its skin, by the contractive faculty of the womb; nor at the woman’s being chearful and easy, and walking by her self from the bed-side to the fire the moment she was deliver’d: but goes on conjecturing in a yet more absurd manner, that these creatures, (as big as rabbits of four months growth, which must be within a trifle as big as full-grown ones,) were bred in the fallopian tubes; and came into the uterus one after another, where they lay and kick’d; till they were press’d to death, and flead, and that all their bones broken, in such manner, that they were sensibly heard to snap, by the violent convulsive motions of it.