Episode 6: The Rabbit Incident - Part 3

If you listened to the last two episodes, you'll have heard about how Mary Toft managed to persuade several people, including one of Britain's highest-ranking physicians, that she was giving birth to dead rabbits, and how she spent 10 days in a boarding-house in Leicester Square surrounded by a crowd waiting for her to produce another rabbit, before she'd admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.

Nathanael St André, the personal Physician to King George I, had published his account on December 3rd, just as the hoax was beginning to fall apart, proclaiming proudly that the rabbits were genuine. He had a great deal of egg on his face now. On December 9th, just 6 days after his triumphant account of his discoveries went to print, and two days after Toft had confessed, the Daily Journal printed his retraction:

"Having contributed, in some measure, to the Belief of an lmpostor, in a Narrative lately published by me, of an extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits, performed by Mr. Howard, Surgeon, of Guildford; and having been since instrumental in discovering the fame; so that I am now thoroughly convinced it is a most abominable Fraud: I think myself obliged, in strict regard to Truth, to acquaint the Publick thereof."

A pamphlet almost immediately came out called The Anatomist Dissected: Or The Man-Midwife finely brought to Bed. Being An EXAMINATION OF THE CONDUCT Of Mr. St. André. Touching the late pretended Rabbit-bearer; as it appears from his own Narrative.

Apparently authored by "Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon and anatomist to the kings of Liliput and Blefuscu, and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Balnibarbi." If you don't know Gulliver's travels, Liliput is an island Gulliver gets shipwrecked on populated by very small people, Blefuscu is its nearby rival island, also populated by very small people, and Balnibarbi is an island impoverished as a result of the amount spent on absurd scientific research projects.

Anyway, the pamphlet is absolutely adorable, written in character, in the style of the narrator of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (which had been published on October 28th 1726, while John Howard was busy pickling rabbit parts that emerged from his patient).

Seriously, this is how it opens:

"After that long and particular Detail of myself, and of my various Adventures in so many different and remote parts of the Globe, as I have lately entertained the Public with, I little thought any private Occurrence, in so small a Spot as the Island of Great Britain, could have rous'd my Attention, and broke in upon that Repose, in which I hoped to have spent the Remains of a declining Life. But small and inconsiderable as it is, I consider it is my own Country; the Thought of which, together with that inextinguishable Thirst after Truth and Knowledge, in regard to my self, and an ardent Inclination of communicating it to others, have prevail'd upon me once more to be expos'd in Print, in order to express my Abhorrence of a late diabolical Imposture: propagated, not so much by the Knavery of some, as by the Ignorance and Stupidity of others. I need not say I mean the Rabbit Affair; with which, for some Weeks past, the Minds of the People of this Island have been so seriously and so surprizingly employ'd; so as scarce to leave them any Leisure for Things of a more sublime Nature, and of vastly greater Consequence and Importance.

And tho' I verily believe this to be the real and only Cause, why the Perusal of my Travels has been so neglected of late, which, by the Decay of the Sale, has sensibly affected a worthy and honest Bookseller; yet I declare to the World, that my Motives for entering the Lists against Mr. St. André (a Person to me wholly unknown, and unheard of till I saw his Name in the News-Papers, upon that unfortunate Accident, which befel him, when he fancied he was poyson'd) are, that little Skill which, by my Education and Experience, I have attain'd in Surgery and Anatomy, and that great Ignorance in both, which he has betray'd upon this Occasion."

The part about when he "fancied he was poisoned" is in reference to an incident in 1724, not long after St André had moved to London, when he claimed he was poisoned while visiting a seedy part of London to treat a woman with a sexually transmitted disease. No potential suspects were ever identified, and the possible motives remain unclear. Many people questioned whether the poisoning had taken place at all.

The Pseudo-Gulliver proceeds to go right through St André's narrative, pointing out everywhere where he should have noticed something was wrong. For instance, it's a bit suspicious that just at the very moment the surgeon arrived, Mary Toft happened to be in labour with the 15th rabbit, and why did Howard leave her at that point, and stay with St André until he was called back in? And why did the cat have fish-bones in its gut?

"For Example, had a Native of the Kingdom of Lilliput, happen'd to be in this our Island, when the Story of the Rabbits was first vented at Court; and had such a one been dispatch'd to Guildford, in Order to enquire into the Truth of that Matter; upon the first View of those Pellets, against which Mr. St. André had no Objection, he, with his fine Microscopic Eyes, would have instantly discover'd every particular Herb the Creature had fed on that Meal. And what Mr. St. André calls a dirty-colour'd Mucus, such as is constantly found in the Bowels of all Fœtus Animals, and such as in those that void their Excrements in Pellets, is commonly hard and dry, our Lilliputian would have distinguish'd to have been nothing but a Parcel of mere Rabbit's Dung, which to him would have appear'd as coarse and large as a Scavenger's Load, fresh taken from a Butcher's Lay-stall would do to us. And that which, in the middle of the Gut Ilium of the Cat, Mr. St. André thought was like a very small Fish Bones, the more quicksighted little Man would have demonstrated to have been nothing more than the Bones of a Herring, which that Creature had devoured a few Hours before it was thrust into the Vagina of Mary Toft's Uterus. Tho', as Arts are very much improv'd with us, I question whether a very ordinary magnifying Glass, such as Children use to divert themselves with, might not have made the Discovery as well.

But, if I am rightly inform'd, as to the Nature of Mr. St. André's Education, I am strangely surpriz'd that He, of all People, should appear so unacquainted with the Materials of which the Strings of a Fiddle are compos'd."

The author expresses sheer incredulity at all the weirdness of the rabbit parts that if you remember earlier St André described. St André's explanation that the rabbits were formed in Mary Toft's fallopian tubes is dismissed, very sensibly, because the fallopian tubes are far too small. The whole thing about the rabbits being ripped apart is just dismissed as weird and implausible, which in fairness it is.

The author of the pamphlet thinks St André, getting carried away with his own ambition, was the innocent (if stupid) victim of a fraud, but claims John Howard was part of the conspiracy - something Toft herself denied, but that makes everything a bit easier to explain.

"In the first Place, I have the Charity to believe he has been egregiously impos'd upon, in Relation to the Character he has publish'd of Mr. Howard, whom he stiles, a Man of known Probity; whereas that Name is as notorious at Guildford, and the Parts adjacent, for denoting a Whisker, as ever mine was at Redriff, for establishing a Truth. Secondly, it must be consider'd that the Pleasure of being talk'd of, and heard to talk, in all Companies public and private, as the very second Discoverer (Mr. Howard being indisputably the first) of this extraordinary and præternatural Production, must needs swell the Mind of a raw Practitioner with Vanity, and make him run blindfold into a Series of Absurdities; no one of which, at another Time, would have found any Admittance within the Bar of his Judgment."

Cyriacus Ahlers, the King's other, more skeptical surgeon had also implicitly implicated Howard, on the basis of things like the odd way him and Mary Toft were positioned during the deliveries Ahlers witnessed, and his refusal to allow Ahlers to assist with any deliveries after his first unfortunate attempt (which we've already seen could also be explained perfectly innocently). Personally I'm not sure at all about Howard. From Ahlers' account, it certainly looks like Howard was in on it, and that was what seems to have stuck in the minds of the general public, but Ahlers' only decent evidence is some of Howard's movements, and the way him and the patient sat during deliveries, and the fact that Mary Toft never names Howard as a co-conspirator despite the physicians James Douglas and Richard Manningham, and the Justice of the Peace Thomas Clarges managing to persuade her to rat on her own husband and mother-in-law works in his favour. In fact, in her first confession, Toft goes as far as to say "I was afraid Howard would find out and we would be ruined", which points very strongly towards Howard being a victim rather than a co-conspirator.

It would certainly have been much easier to pull off the hoax if he was involved, but there's nothing concrete that proves he wasn't just as gullible as St André, that he didn't just want to believe so badly that he'd fall for absolutely anything.

Anyway, the author finishes like this:

"Such is the Use I am always determin'd to make of this my Knowledge of the World and Mankind. As I will not suffer any upstart Pretender, of what Profession soever, to monopolize and vend his Absurdities within this my native Country, without such Animadversions as may serve to warn the publick against him: So, on the other side, if he happens to have any Merit which would shine and be distinguish'd in other Regions of the Earth, I shall be ready to do Justice in that Point also, by letting him know in what part of the World he may be sure to find a proper Reward.

But I can't conclude, without seriously lamenting the great Detriment like to accrue to our Nation by the Stir which has been made about this foul Imposture, both by the Actors and Examiners of it; and that as well in regard to the Warreners and Poulterers, (who complain that the Consumption of Rabbits, within this Metropolis, is become, by two thirds, less than it was formerly;) as in relation to those obscene and indecent Images, which for more than these nine Days last past, beyond all Example, have fill'd the Minds, and furnish'd out the Conversation of People of all Ranks, Ages and Conditions. And whether Ideas of this Nature are fit to be put into the Heads of rude Boys, Boarding-school Girls, and Old Maids, I leave every discreet and prudent Matron to judge."

Obviously St André's reputation was ruined. A broadside, drawn as a comic strip of the whole story, has for its last panel Mary Toft being led away to Bridewell while St André, dressed up like a clown in a ludicrously-patterned jacket and a silly ruff and hat, sits forlornly on a stool in the middle of the room. The caption (making use of the way coney was pronounced at the time, before its pronunciation would shift precisely to avoid the vulgar homophone that was so well-suited to exactly this preposterous scenario):

Strange turn of human life - unhappy Molly
Is now to Bridewell carry'd to mill dolly
The Coney Warren's Ruined and no more
Must ferrets hunt there as they did before,
Poor Andréw sits upon repenting stool,
Cursing his fate in being made a fool.

Indeed, the reputation of medicine and man-midwifery in particular as a profession had taken a serious blow.

St André promised to publish a recantation, which would apparently be titled An Account of the Imposture of Mary Toft, the Godliman Woman, with the Derections of her pretended Deliveries, and the several Stratagems She employ'd to effect the Fraud. This absolutely did not deter the brutal satirists of era. There's another extremely sarcastic commentary on his account of the events, taking it apart bit-by-bit (although disappointingly not written in the voice of Lemuel Gulliver).

"I much wonder then, that with all his penetration and sharp-sightedness, he did not discover the pieces of hay, straw, etc. that Mr Ahlers and other gentlemen discovered in the faeces of the animals, and it is as strange to me that our Author's Anatomy should all turn one way, and still in favour of an event that he said himself he has at length with much ado found out to be an imposture."

There was a ballad that provides a pretty good illustration of the typical themes of most of the Mary Toft satires, and the tune is actually specified for this one, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing (there's 17 verses, but you're only getting five of them):

Monsieur St André, that anatomist rare,
Said that these same rabbits praeternatural were;
And faith, we must own there is something in that
For the first that came out it did prove a black cat

Derry down down hey derry down

Such pangs, such convulsions, such gropings before,
Were never endured by honest woman or whore.
For as sure as St André was poisoned not clapped,
The bones of a rabbit in her uterus snapped

The woman, god bless her, a mere simple tool,
Was more fool than knave, Howard more knave than fool;
But the King knows St André to be twice upon oath,
A due composition of knave and fool both

Tis monstrous a woman such a cheat should pretend
Tis monstrous two surgeons such a cheat should befriend
But the monster of monsters beyond comprehension
Is that they effected a monstrous pension

St André, Sir Richard, who've made all this bother,
What would you not give these rabbits to smother.
But since no more rabbits are sold, it is meet,
That a ballad, at least, should be sold through the street

We've got sarcasm about St André's investigations, hints at Mary Toft's sexual depravity, Toft being dismissed as an idiot who couldn't possibly have had any deliberate involvement in the affair, St André being mercilessly mocked, and sheer glee at the fact that these eminent physicians had made such idiots of themselves. Basically all the main features of the typical Mary Toft satire.

While St André was the principal - and probably the most deserving - target of mockery, the more skeptical attitudes of the other physicians involved weren't enough for them to get away with it either. The very fact that they'd engaged with the affair at all was enough to make them worthy of being pilloried. Ahlers had the good fortune that St André's account, published shortly before the fraud was exposed, is very clear about how he didn't believe Mary Toft's rabbit-births were genuine at any point - this meant he could prove that he didn't fall for it. If St André hadn't published when he did, it would have been easier to claim that Ahlers was simply lying to save face when he claimed after the fraud was exposed that he hadn't fallen for it.

The one of the three main skeptical physicians who was the worst-treated was probably Manningham, who had admitted to making a serious effort to investigate before dismissing the whole thing as a fraud. He seems to have been widely believed to have fallen for Toft and Howard's hoax, or even to have been in on the conspiracy himself - which we can see in the last verse of the ballad you just heard, where he's mentioned alongside St André (St André, Sir Richard, who've made all this bother) - all this despite the fact that he'd actually been the one who had eventually managed to persuade Mary Toft to confess, with his sinister threat of a "very painful experiment".

In an engraving titled Cunicularii - which is usually translated as "the men who burrow like rabbits" - subtitled "the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation" - by none other than William Hogarth himself, Mary Toft, labelled "The Lady in the Straw" is shown in bed at the centre of a sort of mock nativity scene, her head back, screaming in pain, surrounded by various characters from our story, as well as a litter of live rabbits (this is complete artistic licence, there were never any live rabbits actually involved, except the ones Mary Toft apparently saw that inspired the whole farce to begin with). John Howard, labelled "The Guildford Rabbit Man-Midwife" stands at the door, being handed a rabbit that he rejects saying "it's too big" (again, I'm not sure whether or not he actually was a guilty co-conspirator, rather than someone genuinely taken in by the hoax, although virtually everyone at the time seems convinced he was). Mary Toft's sister-in-law, Margaret, sits beside her, labelled "the nurse or rabbit-dresser". St André, labelled "the dancing master or praeternatural anatomist", in reference to his eclectic career that had ended up with him going into medicine of all things, in which he had at one point been a dance teacher (a profession for which he may well have been far more qualified), does a little dance and exclaims "A great birth". Manningham is at the centre of this preposterous scene, delivering a rabbit in an absurd baroque wig, looking outward to the room, like everyone else there clearly more interested in the spectacle he's demonstrating than in the condition of his patient, with his hand extended up into Toft's skirt. He's labelled as "An Occult Philosopher Searching into the Depth of Things", and is shown excitedly exclaiming "It pouts, it swells, it spreads, it comes!".

Dennis Todd argues that he's been conflated with Samuel Molyneux, the Prince of Wales's Secretary, St André's friend, and an amateur astronomer, who had gone to see Mary Toft way back in Guildford despite lacking any kind of medical credentials or expertise, and who had indeed been one of the original true Mary Toft Rabbit Birth Believers. Molyneux is himself a far more deserving subject of satire, and to be fair he does get plenty. Take as an example a ballad by the poet Alexander Pope, titled "The discovery, or the squire turned ferret", (and Pope specified a tune for this one as well, so I'm going to sing again - but only the bit about Molyneux, not all 22 verses, which just tell the story you should know by now from the last two episodes). And remember about the old pronunciation of Coney before it was bowdlerised to prevent exactly the type of pun we see here.

"But Hold! Said Molly. First, let's try
Now that her legs are ope,
If ought within we may descry
By help of telescope.

The instrument himself did make
He raised and levelled right
But all about was so opaque
It could not aid his sight.

On tiptoe then the squire he stood
(but first he gave her money)
Then reached as high as e'er he could
And cried "I feel a Coney!"

Is it alive? St André cried.
It is! I feel it stir.
Is it full-grown? The squire replied;
It is, see, here's the fur."

Douglas gets a similar treatment in an anonymous poem entitled "A shorter and truer advertisement by way of supplement to what was published the 7th instant, or Dr Douglas in an ecstasy at Lacey's Bagnio, December 4th 1726." Again, this is bizarre because Douglas was in actual fact very firmly in the Mary Toft Rabbit Birth Skeptic camp, just like Manningham, and had worked with Manningham on extracting the confession.

With usual shrug and pearl at tip of nose,
Amongst you all I solemnly depose
There's something curious, make no doubt,
Ere it be long, I'll pull it out!

"A birth! A birth! Is now at hand,
Come in without delay!
Nay come, good sirs, this moment in,
Or I will run away.

Unless you all come in and see
This wondrous birth, this prodigy,
I never more belief shall find
Among my brethren or womankind,
Therefore come in with one consent,
For I am in astonishment!"

I suppose engaging at all was enough to leave someone firmly associated with the affair in the mind of the general public. It was only Ahlers who really got away with it, and that was only because he was lucky enough with when St André published his Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits.

Nowadays, we'd find the idea that that a human could give birth to rabbits to be obviously ludicrous. If somebody said they knew about someone who was giving birth to rabbits, we would assume they were either joking or insane, and if you took their claim seriously enough to actually take the time to investigate, everybody would make fun of you. Maybe that's all that's happening with Douglas and Manningham. People sensible enough not to deserve mockery wouldn't have gone all the way to Guildford in the first place to investigate something that they were already certain was a hoax. This would be a bit like what we saw with Alfred Russel Wallace and the Flat Earthers if you listened to those episodes (and if you haven't you definitely should), where even though Wallace very effectively responded to a challenge to prove earth was round, his reputation suffered from the mere fact that he'd engaged with the flat-earthers at all (although in that case none of the media coverage alleged that Wallace actually was a flat-earther). But then, at the same time, surely the fact that a physician as high-ranking as St André seemed to believe it meant it was worth explicitly debunking even if they didn't take it seriously themselves.

The other thing you can see, particularly in the Shorter and Truer Advertisement, is that with words like "this wondrous birth, this prodigy", it's sending up the sort of language people used to talk about so-called "monstrous births" in popular media. The golden age of those monstrous birth ballads, that I talked about in the first episode, that usually describe a baby born with some kind of deformity (with varying degrees of plausibility) and its supposed moral and theological implications, really lasted for a bit more than a hundred years, from the second half of the 16th century until the late 17th century, not long before the Mary Toft incident took place (in the early 18th century people were certainly still interested in monstrous births, and they're reported in newspapers and things, and people still payed money to go and stare at disabled people, but they're not one of the main subjects of ballads anymore). These ballads all talk of monstrous births as if they are divine punishments for the sins of the child's parents, or as portents, warning of the impending apocalypse. The word "prodigy", which the Shorter and Truer Advertisement has Douglas using, was a popular one for talking about monstrous births, and has an etymology very similar to "monster", coming from the Latin word Prodigium, meaning "omen" or "portent" (although by this point it was very much also being used simply to mean "something extraordinary", so the Shorter and Truer Advertisement is probably more engendering a vibe of old monstrous birth coverage, rather than actually claiming that James Douglas believed Mary Toft giving birth to rabbits was a sign from God warning of the apocalypse).

Such ideas had little place in Newton's Clockwork Universe, and indeed we actually don't see them anywhere in even St André's credulous account of Mary Toft's rabbit births. Instead, the explanation is entirely based on the theory of maternal impressions - that is, the idea that the mother's thoughts during pregnancy could have a physical effect on the baby - in this case, Mary Toft saw some rabbits, craved rabbit meat, dreamt about rabbits, and it led to her giving birth to dead rabbits. This is still wrong, but it's much more in keeping with an enlightenment way of thinking than the reformation-era idea of monstrous births as direct divine interventions. However, it seems like in that stanza of the Shorter and Truer Advertisement, the author might nonetheless be trying to associate the attitude of the Mary Toft Rabbit Birth believers (which the author takes as including Douglas) with those old superstitious beliefs.

Next time, we're going to talk about another figure, who also appeared in Hogarth's Cunicularii, despite his actual involvement in the Mary Toft affair being minimal, and whose writings, which certainly did reflect something of that older attitude to monstrous births, became closely associated with the incident.

Thank you for listening, come back next time for the last episode in the miniseries, to hear about John Maubray, known at the Sooterkin Doctor.

Episode 6: The Rabbit Incident - Part 3

Transcript download for this episode coming soon