Mary Toft: The Woman Who Convinced England’s Top Doctors She Was Giving Birth to Rabbits

In 1726, Mary Toft, a poor, illiterate woman from Surrey pulled off something remarkable. She convinced some of England’s most respected doctors that she’d given birth to rabbits. Not one. Seventeen of them, over several weeks, delivered in front of actual witnesses. It sounds like something nobody could possibly fall for. Royal surgeons fell for it anyway, and so did the king’s own household.

It Started With a Miscarriage and a Rabbit

Mary Toft, 24 years old and married to a journeyman clothier, had a miscarriage in August 1726. According to her own account, she’d been startled by a rabbit while working in a field not long before. A month later, she went into labor again, this time in front of her neighbor and mother-in-law. She delivered what looked like the liverless body of a cat.

Her mother-in-law reported the strange birth to a local surgeon named John Howard. He visited the next day and helped deliver more animal parts himself. Over the following weeks, that included a rabbit’s head, the legs of a cat, and eventually nine dead baby rabbits. Howard, apparently unbothered by how insane this all sounds now, pickled each specimen. He lined the jars up on a shelf in his study.

Word Reached the King, and He Sent His Own Surgeon

Howard wrote to prominent doctors across England, and the story eventually reached King George I himself. The king dispatched Nathaniel St. André, a Swiss surgeon attached to the royal household, along with Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales.

St. André arrived, watched Toft deliver more rabbits, and came away completely convinced it was real. He published a short account of what he’d witnessed, called “A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets.” By then, Toft had become something close to a national celebrity. She got moved to Guildford, then eventually to London, so more doctors could observe her up close.

One Doctor Actually Noticed Something Was Off

The king sent a second surgeon too, Cyriacus Ahlers, and Ahlers turned out to be considerably harder to fool. He noticed Toft kept her legs pressed together the whole time. It looked like she was physically guarding against something falling out on its own. When he examined the rabbit remains directly, the cuts looked clean and deliberate. Something had made them with an actual instrument, not torn them the way birth naturally would.

Then he checked the droppings. He found straw and grain inside them. No creature could have eaten that while supposedly developing inside a human body. Ahlers reported his suspicions to the king that November. St. André dismissed the findings outright and rushed to get to the king first with reassurances that everything was genuine.

Why Anyone Believed This in the First Place

The hoax landed at a genuinely strange moment for medicine. Eighteenth-century doctors took a real belief called “maternal impression” seriously, the idea that a shock or fright during pregnancy could physically alter a growing fetus. A woman startled by a rabbit giving birth to something rabbit-adjacent wasn’t automatically absurd to a doctor trained under that framework. It fit an existing theory well enough that several respected physicians talked themselves into believing something they should have questioned immediately.

Reputation also did a lot of damage here. St. André had royal backing and a real professional standing to protect. Once he’d staked his name on the births being genuine, walking that back publicly meant admitting he’d been fooled by an illiterate woman from Surrey. That’s a hard thing for an ambitious court surgeon to say out loud. It’s a big part of why he kept dismissing Ahlers’s much more careful, skeptical findings for as long as he possibly could.

The Whole Thing Fell Apart Fast After That

Baron Thomas Onslow, a former member of Parliament, ran his own investigation around the same time. He discovered that Toft’s husband had been quietly buying rabbits. A porter at her London lodgings admitted it too, once pressed. Someone had bribed him to sneak the animals in to her.

Sir Richard Manningham, another respected physician brought in to examine Toft, had his own doubts too, though St. André and Howard reportedly talked him into staying quiet until there was firmer proof of fraud. That proof arrived fast. On December 7, 1726, Mary Toft finally confessed in writing. She faced the threat of invasive surgery to check for some kind of unusual anatomy, and that was apparently enough. She confessed again the next day, and once more after that. Nobody would be able to claim she’d been coerced into a single false statement. The timing could not have landed worse for St. André. His glowing, “true-to-life” account of the rabbit births had gone to print just four days before her confession.

England Spent Months Laughing at the Doctors, Not Mary

Once the hoax became public, the ridicule landed almost entirely on the physicians who’d been fooled, not on Toft herself. Satirical prints and pamphlets flooded London. William Hogarth produced a print called “Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation,” mocking the whole affair directly. St. André’s reputation never recovered. A relative of Molyneux even accused him of murder in print, over an unrelated matter. Nothing ever came of the charge.

Mary Toft herself was arrested and briefly held on suspicion of fraud, but no formal prosecution ever followed. She eventually returned home to Godalming and essentially vanished from the historical record after that. It’s a strange footnote for a woman who’d spent a few months in late 1726 as the single most talked-about person in the entire country.

Today, the case gets treated mostly as a punchline. It’s a weird fact people trot out to make fun of how gullible the eighteenth century supposedly was. That framing misses the more useful part of the story. Respected, credentialed doctors examined the same evidence multiple times and still convinced themselves it was real. That lasted right up until someone finally checked what was actually inside a rabbit’s stomach. Expertise didn’t save them. Paying close enough attention to notice the straw did.