Peasants in 1726 bred like rabbits, but Mary Toft’s midwife jumped to the wrong conclusion when she pulled a rabbit out of Mary’s … um, hat. Mary Toft was birthing bunnies, so her family called on John Howard (a man-midwife with over 30 years experience). Howard, an hop-timist about Mary’s honesty, set out to investigate. He was unable to explain the phenomenon, so he took a leap of faith, and sent a series of letters to prominent English doctors of the time.
The resulting publicity caught the attention of King George I who deployed royal scientists to investigate. To their amazement, Mary Toft’s body shook with exaggerated ‘birthquakes’ before she popped out the body parts of dead rabbits.
Rabbit parts, taken back to London for study, raised suspicion among sceptics. A piece of newborn rabbit lung floated on water. Dung pellets in one rabbit rectum contained corn, hay, and straw. How could they have developed in Mary? Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household, however, remained convinced. Mary told him that she craved rabbit meat, dreamt of rabbits, and tried to catch them in her garden while pregnant. It all fit neatly into his theory of ‘maternal impression’.
The king was intrigued. He, himself, had a few kids born on the wrong side of the blanket, so to speak. He ordered that Mary Toft be taken to London for further study. She was moved to Lacey’s Bagnio, an inn and bathhouse, in Leicester Fields. Here, the doctors watched her like hawks, waiting to see if she could produce an inn-grown hare.
Under constant supervision, however, Mary failed to deliver bunnies. She had one bad hare day after another. Her receding hare line was giving her believers grey hares. As the investigation went further down the rabbit hole, her hare-brained scheme was uncovered. Toft’s husband, Joshua, had been buying young rabbits. A porter at the bagnio confessed that he had been bribed by Toft’s sister-in-law, Margaret, to sneak a rabbit into Toft’s chamber. Caught like a rabbit in the headlights, Mary Toft eventually confessed to the fraud and implicated her co-conspirators.
In the end, no-one lived hoppily ever after. Mary achieved infamy but did not accumulate a fortune. As for the medical professionals who delivered her rabbit’s foot, they had no luck resurrecting their careers.
Many people in eighteenth-century England believed in the theory of ‘maternal impressions’. This notion suggested that the experiences of a pregnant woman are imprinted on her child. The “Elephant-man” (Joseph Carey Merrick) was told that his condition resulted from his mother being frightened and knocked over by a circus elephant while she was pregnant with Joseph. Giving birth to a blind or deaf baby was explained away by the witnessing of a blind person or being startled by a loud sound during pregnancy. People even believed that strange birthmarks on babies resembled the shapes of things an expectant mother had seen during her pregnancy. Unattractive children could be attributed to the mothers’ over-familiarity with household pets. At the time, fear of maternal impression caused some countries to ban the exhibition of “Siamese Twins”.
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