WTF, Rabbits?
Was pretty much my first reaction to hearing the story of Mary Toft. I was prepping for an interview with Amelia Dale by reading her thesis, which just mentions Toft in passing.
Mary Toft who, in 1726, managed to convince such respected figures as Nicholas St André, the Court anatomist, that she had given birth to several rabbits.
Which seemed just crazy. Amelia’s thesis is about the 18th-Century legacy of Don Quixote, the subject of that Quixote-themed podcast (you can hear her explain why Jane Austen fans have in common with him here), so I quickly skipped on.
But not before I annotated the hell out of it.
Toft was a big deal in the 1720s, when she said she’d given birth to rabbits. Unless you’re especially interested in medical history, the only place you’re likely to have heard of her is in this Hogarth engraving of the birth.
(It does look a lot like a comic. That’s another story.)
People who have some kind of residual memory of the story probably know it from that engraving.
Toft, herself, lived right around the time when barely-respectable doctors were beginning to get into covering childbirth, trying to push midwives and other women out of the way. (Of course, these doctors were men.)
Her story fed into the collision of these two fields, and also into the field of monster birth narratives. Which were popular (medical) stories at the time.
The first time I recorded Amelia, I asked her about the Toft story. “Why would you..? Like, I can see it was a great prank..”
“Well, it wasn’t for a prank.” she replied. “It was ’cause she wanted money. She was really poor.”
The second time I asked her, she went a bit further. Mary wasn’t the only person in the story involved in this “prank”. There were people around her who could have had reasons to want her to fake a story like this.
And, while many the doctors of the day picked her “birth” story apart, they don’t necessarily come out of it all that much better. This story comes during the middle of a change in the birthing process. In the upper class, at least, midwives were beginning to be displaced by these new, “male midwives”. Doctors.
How much better were they than midwives? Um, well:
So, if these are the men of science during this story, what was it like to be Mary? Amelia told us a bit more about that as our guest on the show this week.
Click through to the show page. She’ll lay it out for you.
Not What You Think is broadcast 10:30am Saturdays in September and October, on Sydney’s FBi Radio. Listen live on 94.5 FM or the website, or subscribe to the podcast via our show page.
