Birthing Rabbits

 

Mary Toft was a peasant woman from Surrey in England. One day, after seeing a rabbit in the field and having chased it in vain, she, 5-6 weeks pregnant, started to dream of rabbits and to crave rabbits meat all the time. However, being poor, she couldn't afford such a luxury meal. Some time later she had a miscarriage and then, after a couple of weeks, everything grew weirder than weird: She "gave birth" to what resembled parts of a pig. That was just the forerunner of her "birthing" strange, animal parts, and all of this worried her mother-in-law so much that she sent for the local midwife who was a man by the name of John Howard.

This midwife must either have been a very naive man or an accomplice because seemingly he believed in the story of the "rabbit-mother", Mary Toft. He got her moved to a nearby inn and started to summon his colleagues in London to come and see his patient. Many doctors became interested in this strange occurrence of a human rabbit-Mom, but so did the King, George I, and he had her moved to London where his doctors were to see her and attend to her. His personal doctor, Nathaniel St Andre, came to see her, and he was convinced that she had in fact given birth to rabbits. However, some doctors dismissed Mary Toft as a total fraud and would have nothing to do with her, and, of course, they were right: She was indeed a fraud, and at one point she couldn't keep it up anymore.

After some time, she got depressed and maybe even suicidal. Anyway, she ended up confessing when one of the doctors said she had to undergo a very painful examination. At first, she told a very tall story of a non-existing woman who had induced her to pretend to be a "rabbit-Mom", but soon she accused her husband and her mother-in-law of making her do what she had done. Then, after some time, she confessed that she, and she alone, had cooked up the story of her birthing rabbits. 

All of this must have seemed very strange indeed to everybody, from the common Englishman to the legal authorities who were to judge her. How is one to sentence a lying rabbit-(non-)birthing woman? Well, she did get a prison-sentence in April 1727, but was released a couple of months later after becoming very ill. It seems she returned to her husband and that she maybe did have a human baby by him. She is supposed to have died in obscurity in, or around, 1763, but she and her "rabbit-kids" have not been forgotten, even today. 

Wikipedia