Mary Toft was a British national from Surrey born in 1701, who became quite a controversy in the year 1726. She started giving birth to rabbit babies,seeing this her family summoned the local surgeon, John Howard. He saw Mary Toft deliver a litter of 9 rabbits, they were neither alive nor intact, but what actually came out of her were parts of dead rabbits. A stunned John Howard brought the bizarreness to the attention of other physicians. Soon enough, King George I of Great Britain himself sent two prominent surgeons to investigate the matter- Nathanael St. Andre, surgeon-anatomist to the King, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales. Toft explained the surgeons about how she had developed an intense craving for rabbit meat during her pregnancy. Furthermore, she told them that following unsuccessful attempts of chasing the rabbits down, she dreamt of rabbits in her lap. And then she started giving birth to rabbits. Mary Toft continued to give birth to more rabbits, this time in the presence of notable doctors.In order to find substantial clues and verify the authenticity of this strange phenomenon, the doctors performed tests. For example,they added a lung piece of one of the dead rabbits to the water and noticed that the piece stayed afloat, giving rise to the logic that the rabbit must have breathed air before, something that isn’t a possibility inside a womb.
Thomas Onslow the local policeman suspected Mary and hence started investigating her. He found in his investigation, that from past one month, Toft’s husband had been buying young rabbits. The same day, a porter called Thomas Howard, confessed that he had been bribed by the woman’s sister-in-law to sneak a rabbit into her chamber. Mary Toft denied the accusation at first, but when a famous London physician, Sir Richard Manningham, threatened her that he might have to perform a very painful surgical operation to examine her uterus, she got scared and told the physician that an accomplice had inserted the claws of a cat and a rabbit’s head into her womb. So basically, for all the times she made it seem as though it were animals that she was giving birth to instead of a regular human baby, it was all a result of animals having been previously inserted into her vagina. But up until then, Mary Toft had gone to large extents to prove the existence of something, that in real terms, have always been impossible. It was a big shame on the part of the doctors that defended her case, and it goes unsaid, their careers were effectively ruined. And Mary Toft was sent to prison.
