The Woman Who Fooled Doctors With a Rabbit Scheme

Claim A says Mary Toft was exposed by a rabbit in her dress pocket. Claim B says a bathhouse porter was caught smuggling her a rabbit. Claim B is true, and Claim A is completely made up.

In autumn 1726, Mary Toft, a poor, illiterate woman from Godalming, Surrey, convinced local doctors that she was giving birth to rabbits. The story spread so far that it reached the royal court, and the king's own anatomist, Nathaniel St. André, came to examine her.

On 29 November 1726, Mary was brought to London and lodged at Lacy's Bagnio, a bathhouse in Leicester Fields. Doctors hovered, waiting for the next "birth."

Then came the slip. A bathhouse porter, Thomas Howard, was caught smuggling in a rabbit. He swore a statement before a Justice of the Peace, saying Mary's sister-in-law had asked him to find the smallest rabbit he could.

Mary was taken into custody but admitted nothing. She held out until Sir Richard Manningham threatened painful experimental surgery to see whether she was formed differently from other women. On 7 December 1726, she confessed to inserting dead rabbits herself.

The timing was brutal for St. André, who had published a 40-page pamphlet on 3 December giving a non-skeptical account of the births.

As for the dress-pocket story, no historical account says she was caught that way. She was exposed through the porter and the smuggled rabbit.

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