Found this rather interesting story, and i thought it wise to share with you, i am sure you would love the story as i did too.. Enjoy..
The men from London arrived just in time to see Mary Toft give birth to her fifteenth rabbit.
It was the winter of 1726, and Nathaniel St. André and Samuel Molyneux arrived in the market town of Godalming in Surrey to meet Mary Toft, a short, stout peasant of "stupid and sullen temper" (per St. André's later, embittered description). They found the country-woman waiting at the house of local man-midwife John Howard. She was lingering on the edge of a bed, stripped down to her corset. Howard assured the Londoners that they had come just in time.
Soon Mary Toft's body began to twist and contort. Her throes could be so powerful that her clothes would fly off her body, and the woman would have to be held down in her chair. Sometimes the labors lasted up to a day and a half. Toft's belly would "leap," a phenomenon Howard thought was caused by baby rabbits jumping around inside Toft's uterus. One was observed to hop like this for eighteen hours.
But that winter day, the labor was not prolonged, and soon Toft had delivered her child--the skinned torso of a small rabbit. The men from London started dissecting it right there on the floor. St. André--surgeon anatomist to the King of England himself--took a section of lung and put it in a basin of water. It floated, showing that the lungs had air in them, which suggested that the creature had breathed before it died. The rabbit's anus was found to have feces in it, which meant that the small animal must have eaten something. There was no blood.
St. André then turned his attention to the mother, who had been waiting patiently by the fire. He found that one breast produced a thin, watery milk. After palpating Mary's stomach, St. André found a hard lump in the woman's right side. From this he concluded that the rabbits had been bred in Toft's fallopian tubes, after which they had hopped down to her uterus, where they developed. With no prospect of another birth any time soon, the men retired.
In the evening Mary Toft fell into convulsions again--this time so violent she had to be held in her chair. "After three or four very strong Pains that lasted several minutes, I delivered her of the skin of the rabbet, rolled and squeezed up like a Ball," St André wrote later. The rabbit's head came soon after, complete except for one ear.
Satisfied, St. André and his companion Molyneux returned to London with some of Mary's purported offspring, preserved by Howard in jars of alcohol. By the end of the year, all of England--even King George I himself--would know about the woman who had given birth to rabbits. Mary Toft claimed that the trouble had started that October when she was working in the fields and saw a rabbit scampering by. That night she dreamed of rabbits, hungered after rabbits, became totally obsessed by rabbits. She wanted rabbit for dinner, but her family was too poor to afford it. For this reason, the dreams continued.
The following August she miscarried. But the symptoms of her pregnancy persisted. In late September a neighbor was called to the Toft's house in Godalming to find Mary Toft in a painful labor. She was giving birth to a monster: the dismembered pieces of a small cat and the backbone of an eel. Someone summoned a midwife--baffled, she called for backup.
Contemporary illustration of a rabbit delivery.
Backup came in the form of local man-midwife John Howard from the nearby town of Guildford. Howard examined Toft, and the woman promptly delivered more mangled cat parts. But Howard was not yet convinced. He told the Toft family that he would not believe the supernatural character of the births until the complete monster had been born. The final part of the monster dutifully came--the head--but it was not the head of a cat. It was the head of a rabbit.
In the weeks afterward, Howard returned to Godalming again and again just in time to view Mary giving birth to nuggets of rabbit. Howard became so distracted by Mary's progeny that he was forced to move her to his home in Guildford, where he could study her without having to continually make the treks out to Godalming.
Mary's story fit with the best medical thinking of the time. It was believed that a pregnant mother's dreams, fantasies, and imaginations could become imprinted on a fetus. The influential physician John Maubray was convinced that if pregnant women sat on stoves they would give birth to small mouse-like abortions called sooterkin. In the first century A.D. the grandfather of natural history, Pliny the Elder, wrote of the Roman matron Alcippa who gave birth to an elephant. Dr. Thomas Bartholin, a seventeenth-century Danish physician who was the first person to describe the human lymphatic system, described a well-bred woman giving birth to a full-grown rat who, on being born, promptly scurried away. The cause of Mary Toft's peculiar pregnancy was clear to a learned doctor like Howard: the power of Mary Toft's obsession for rabbit flesh had transformed her fetus into rabbits. The rabbits were split into multiple pieces, appearing to be between two and four months old. Howard presumed that they had been dismembered by the powerful contractions of Toft's vagina. Howard wrote of his discovery to "persons of distinction" in London and continued to document Mary Toft's strange case while he waited for experts more eminent than himself.
In time, one such eminent man did make the trip from London to Surrey. A member of King George's Court visited Guildford and was impressed by Mary Toft, the jars of rabbit-parts, and the whole grisly story. When King George himself heard the story, he was intrigued, and sent Samuel Molyneux to further confirm the strange events. Molyneux was a capable astronomer and mathematician who had built one of Britain's first telescopes at his home in Kew. But while his scientific credentials were impeccable, he was no doctor. He asked his friend and personal physician, the Swiss-born Nathaniel St. André, to help with the investigation.
The only thing people could agree on regarding St. André was that he was an unrelenting self-promoter. St. André placed bevies of advertisements in newspaper after newspaper, touting his close connections to the Court. He managed to turn a paper for the Royal Society describing a burst bowel into a story of his great skill as a surgeon and anatomist. He was supposedly poisoned in a dark London alley investigating a woman with venereal disease--and published daily dispatches from his sickbed describing his valiant struggle to hang on to life, full of name-dropping references to how his close friends at Court were very worried for him. The height of his career came when he was called to treat a minor ailment of the King. After the successful treatment, St. André was rewarded with a sword straight from His Majesty's side. Unsurprisingly, St. André made this fact very well known.
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