A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform'd

In the winter of 1726, England fell under the spell of the most audacious medical hoax in its history. A Surrey woman named Mary Toft began delivering rabbits, one after another, to the astonishment of surgeons, the royal court, and a ravenous public. This pamphlet, published in 1727 by surgeon Nathanael St. André, offers the earliest printed account of the affair, presenting the bizarre events with earnest medical authority before the inevitable unraveling. It captures a nation in the grip of credulity, where learned men debated how a woman's body could produce such creatures, where King George I himself awaited updates, and where print culture fed the frenzy with pamphlets and broadsheets. St. André writes as a believer, documenting what he witnessed with the conviction of a man certain he is recording a genuine marvel. The hoax would eventually collapse, Toft was caught stuffing rabbits into herself, but the affair remains a landmark in the history of deception, revealing the fragile boundaries between the miraculous and the fraudulent at the dawn of modern skepticism.