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	Mary Toft
		Mary Toft, the Rabbit Woman of Godalming [Guildford, Godliman], was a 25-year-old servant girl when she convinced several physicians, including the King of England’s surgeon, that she had given birth to rabbits.
		Mary Toft's hoax happened in 1726, during the reign of King George I. Mrs.
		Toft, she told them that before her misadventure with rabbit births she had had a strong craving for rabbit meat, she often dreamed of rabbits, and spent much time trying to catch them in the garden.
	skepdic.com /toft.html (1194 words)

	Mary Toft (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Mary Toft was a maidservant from Godalming, England who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she was alleged to have given birth to at least 16 rabbits, according to her doctors.
		Toft was 25 years old and married at the time, and despite a miscarriage in August still seemed pregnant.
		Toft claimed that during pregnancy she had an intense craving for roast rabbit, that she tried to catch rabbits in the garden, that she had admired them in the village market, and that she had dreamed about rabbits.
	www.worldhistory.com /wiki/M/Mary-Toft.htm (346 words)

	MedicalPost.com: What's up, doc? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Mary was an unremarkable 25-year-old, employed as a maid and married to Joshua Toft.
		Mary Toft gave birth not to a fetus, or any kind of human child.
		Mary was imprisoned for fraud, and on release could never escape her notoriety.
	www.medicalpost.com /mpcontent/article.jsp;jsessionid=BKHPKMCGOPMH?content=20030318_094055_3364 (746 words)

	Mosaic 2 Reading \| Scanning for Synonyms
		But in England in the year 1726, Mary Toft and her rabbit babies were one of the country's most baffling medical mysteries.
		Late in 1726, Mary Toft, a young housemaid, summoned the local doctor, John Howard, to her house in Godalming, England, where she proceeded to give birth to nine dead rabbits.
		Mary Toft is also the subject of the book The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery by Clifford Pickover, as well as a play called The Rabbits of Godalming, by Peter Morgan.
	highered.mcgraw-hill.com /sites/0072329645/student_view0/chapter4/before_you_read.html (1320 words)

	Mary Toft and the Rabbit Babies
		But for sheer strangeness, nothing surpassed the infamous case of Mary Toft of Godalming and her rabbit babies.
		Mary explained to these men that she had recently miscarried, but that during the pregnancy she had intensely craved rabbit meat.
		She explained that she had simply inserted the dead rabbits inside her womb when no one was looking, motivated by a desire for fame and the hope of receiving a pension from the King.
	www.museumofhoaxes.com /mary_toft.html (497 words)

	The Girl Who Gave Birth To Rabbits
		Mary Toft was a young woman with a peculiar passion -- and an ordinary life that was forever changed when she gave birth to something inhuman.
		Mary careened out of control, a pawn in the hands of the powerful while she forced her contemporaries to question their most basic beliefs.
		Mary Toft's story contain timeless themes: justice and morality, crime and punishment, and science and superstition separated by the filmiest of curtains.
	sprott.physics.wisc.edu /pickover/rabbitad.html (653 words)

	disinformation \| the girl who gave birth to rabbits
		In October 1726, Mary Toft--a 26-year-old woman living in a village in Surrey, England--supposedly started giving birth to dead rabbits (or, more specifically, pieces of dead rabbits), triggering one of the greatest medical mysteries in history.
		The answer is that Mary's story contains timeless themes: justice and morality, crime and punishment, and science and superstition separated by the flimsiest of curtains.
		Mary was moved to London and put under constant surveillance.
	www.disinfo.com /archive/pages/review/id2083/pg1 (390 words)

	Early Modern Notes » 2005 » February » 06
		A couple of blog posts about monstrous births in the early modern period over the last few days: Natalie at Philobiblon discussing Agnes Bowker (supposedly delivered of a cat-like creature in 1568), and Ephelia on Mary Toft (who was reported to have given birth to a large number of rabbits in 1726).
		Mary Toft’s case is the better-known, to us at first an amusing tale of a trickster; when we learn that she had genuinely suffered a miscarriage, perhaps a little less so.
		In the case of Agnes Bowker in 1568, it was a matter of considerable concern to government ministers that her case could be used by Catholic propagandists to undermine the still rather shaky Protestant regime of Elizabeth I. By the 1720s, Mary Toft could still convince doctors (to begin with), and the possibility was accepted.
	www.earlymodernweb.org.uk /emn/index.php/archives/2005/02/06 (679 words)

	Criticism: Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England. - book reviews
		Todd points to widespread ambivalence and confusion on the part of the general public, arguing that in dealing with their reactions "we are often in [a] hazy psychological realm where distinctions between belief and disbelief are not clear-cut and where degrees of conviction are hard to measure" (42).
		The analysis here is incisive, although it might have been enhanced by including consideration of Pope's curious letter, ostensibly "To a Lady from her Brother," recounting his visit to a hermaphrodite in the company of a physician and a divine, each of whom comes up with a different opinion of the creature's "true" sex.
		Nevertheless, in the absence of such gender considerations, the concept of identity at the heart of the book's analysis might strike some readers as overly generalized and disembodied despite the historical specificity and psychological nuance with which it is explored.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n1_v39/ai_19432247 (679 words)

	The Rabbit Woman
		Soon after Mary Toft confess’d she had procured the Rabbet, according to the Porter’s Deposition, but that it was her Intention to eat it, she having long’d for it, and most obstinately persisted that she was still big with a Rabbet.
		That Mary Toft asking what Way that was, the Woman told her she must put up her Body so many Pieces of Rabbets as would make up the Number of Rabbets which a Doe-Rabbet usually kindles at one Time, otherwise she would be suspected.
		Tofts [sic] from her confinement, and all future enquiry about it; which I am confident she would not have obtain’d, if there had been any reasonable Grounds to form a Prosecution against Her.
	www.infopt.demon.co.uk /grub/rabbit.htm (2082 words)

	Barash
		Toft's story has been read in the context of shifting models of female anatomy and shifting narratives of female desire and human generation in the eighteenth century.
		But as Toft was transported from Godalming to London, for further examination, the constant questioning and repeated explorations of her body (her breasts and tongue in addition to the more predictable vagina and uterus) seem to have broken her spirit as well as her story.
		Toft's and Gulliver's stories are part of a cultural obsession with monstrous births, monstrous mothers, and the possibility that maternity itself was something dangerous, excessive, and in need of public regulation.
	social.chass.ncsu.edu /wyrick/debclass/barash.htm (5343 words)

	weird (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		In 1726, Mary Toft claimed that a six foot tall rabbit had sexually assaulted her in a field.
		However, the deception was brought to light when Mary was moved to a London hospital where she could be watched constantly.
		Mary had hid the rabbits in her nightgown, and when no one was looking, she had inserted the rabbits into her womb, before giving 'birth' to them.
	website.lineone.net /~vclues/just.htm (629 words)

	Sample text for Library of Congress control number 2002000466
		The woman Mary Toft has just now given birth to three more rabbits, one of which leaped in her body for all to see, for eighteen hours before it died and came out, which was a great satisfaction to the curious.
		My sister Toft told him it was no wonder the poor woman cried, when he had as good as called her a liar in front of the whole company.
		Dr. Howard was charged with conspiracy, and Mary Toft was sent to the Bridewell jail as a "Notorious and Vile Cheat," but she was released after a few months, probably to save the prominent Londoners taken in by the hoax from further embarrassment.
	www.loc.gov /catdir/samples/har051/2002000466.html (4249 words)

	Erin O'Connor
		Todd explains that according to Mary Toft and her doctors, she was suffering from a classic case of "maternal impression;" in other words, Mary Toft gave birth to seventeen rabbits because she was obsessed with rabbits while she was pregnant.
		This is the crux of Todd's argument, which contends that Mary Toft's alleged ability to convert a potentially sentient being into so much monstrous, insensate matter simply by dreaming of and longing for rabbits represented the power of the imagination to overwhelm, and even annihilate, body and mind.
		The first half of the book illuminates the specific anxieties sparked by the Toft hoax, showing how it provoked the first systematic interrogation of the doctrine of maternal impression, and exploring how both popular and scientific accounts of the case framed monstrous birth as a perilous breach of psychic, bodily, and ontological boundaries.
	www.erinoconnor.org /reviews/todd.shtml (853 words)

	USATODAY.com - 'Rabbits' jumps into fertile stories of women (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		She culled these historically based fictions from what she calls the "flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years" — surgical case notes, a painting, a plague ballad.
		The book leaps to life with the tale of Mary Toft, a peasant who in 1726 convinced half of England she had given birth to rabbits.
		Toft is one of several characters who seem to stand still and allow life to wash over them.
	www.usatoday.com /life/books/2002/2002-05-16-rabbits.htm (370 words)

	What is this Cloning ? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Boisselier's claim was met with widespread skepticism, due to the complete lack of evidence she offered in support of it.
		Mary was taken to London, but under constant supervision she failed to produce any more rabbits.
		Sir Richard Manningham declared that he should surgically examine her to determine where the rabbits were coming from, and that's when she confessed that she had been putting them there herself when no one was looking.
	www.susannassoapbox.com /ezinejan.html (485 words)

	CNN.com
		Mary Toft claimed that she had actually given birth to rabbits, and she provided pretty compelling proof that this had happened, because in front of the king's own surgeon, the king of England, she proceeded to give birth to rabbits.
		In fact, she gave birth to about 18 or 20 of them, and proceeded to become one of the most famous women in England for a period of a few weeks, as the woman giving birth to rabbits.
		And of course, surgery and in 1725 or 1726 was a death sentence, so Mary Toft quickly confessed that she was just hoaxing.
	transcripts.cnn.com /TRANSCRIPTS/0212/31/lol.10.html (889 words)

	Cliff Pickover's Internet Encyclopedia of Hoaxes
		Mary Toft, the young woman who, in 1726, appeared to be giving birth to rabbits.
		Mary Toft's story is so notable that it is actually on file at the U.S. Army Medical Library in Washington D.C. Because Mary Toft was never thought of as crazy before the incident, many accepted her tale.
		Mary Toft's story and her physicians' gullibility show how "experts" can easily be coaxed into making confident pronouncements in spite of their misunderstanding and limited knowledge.
	sprott.physics.wisc.edu /pickover/pc/hoax.html (4608 words)

	Toft Family Genealogy Forum
		Toft from Norway (NOT Tofte) - Jessica Toft 1/25/04
		Re: Toft from Norway (NOT Tofte) - Emily McGiffin 2/22/04
		Toft - Francis 1854 Sheffield Stavely - Duncan 11/12/01
	genforum.genealogy.com /cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?toft::46.html (382 words)

	Publisher description for Library of Congress control number 95004102 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits.
		Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her.
		In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous.
	www.loc.gov /catdir/description/uchi052/95004102.html (288 words)

	TOFTS family: Thomas 8
		Thomas TOFTS married Mary SMITH in the Essex village of Langley in 1746, but this is the first TOFTS entry in the parish register, and the Thomas’ parish of origin is not known.
		Thomas was buried at Langley in 1783 and Mary was also buried there five years later.
		It is presently assumed that Thomas TOFTS-7 was the son of Thomas and Mary TOFTS who baptised their children in Langley from 1747.
	www.btinternet.com /~surrey.hypno/Genealogy/Tofts/TOFT-B8.htm (352 words)

	Prometheus Books
		Mary Toft was a seemingly ordinary young woman, but with a peculiar passion-and an ordinary life that was forever changed when she gave birth to something inhuman.
		From that moment onward, she was propelled into a world she never dreamed existed-a dark, alien, medical subculture flourishing in the courts of the king.
		Mary Toft's story bears uncanny parallels with our own time and contains perennial themes: science and superstition separated by the flimsiest of curtains, justice and morality, crime and punishment, and the greed and basic fears at the core of human nature.
	www.prometheusbooks.com /catalog/book_883.html (317 words)

	protein wisdom (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		In late 1726 the surgeon John Howard was called to the house of Mary Toft in Godalming, England.
		Mary Toft explained to these men that she had recently miscarried, but that during the pregnancy she had intensely craved rabbit meat.
		It is said that she gave birth to a normal human child less than a year after the incident with the rabbits.
	www.proteinwisdom.com /archives/002826.html (584 words)

	"Off-Off Online : Review Archives (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Mary Toft (Laura Esposito) is a pregnant peasant woman who suddenly starts giving birth to deceased rabbits.
		Her bizarre births are verified by a small-town midwife named John Howard (Richard Bubbico), who, while skeptical at first, soon spreads Mary's story to an ever-growing number of onlookers and learned experts.
		Even the birthing scenes, which might otherwise have tread dangerously close to reality, become truly bizarre, as Mary's rabbity offspring are represented by small, reddish balls that shoot like projectiles out from between her legs.
	www.offoffonline.com /reviews.php?id=425 (766 words)

	Bunnies: Part One (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		From the press materials: "Bunnies: Part One is the first installment of a two-part comedy based on the true story of Mary Toft, an English peasant woman who had her entire country convinced she was birthing rabbits.
		Part One follows the struggles of Mary and John Howard, the small-town midwife who champions her cause, despite his own ethical misgivings.
		But for me it is Laura Esposito who steals the night as the bunny-squirting Mary Toft.
	www.nytheatre.com /nytheatre/bunn1946.htm (749 words)

	SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Features -- HOAX QUIZ ANSWERS
		In 1726, Mary Toft of Godalming, England, summoned John Howard, a local doctor, to help deliver her first child.
		But Toft gave birth to a stillborn rabbit, not a baby.
		Mary admitted she had inserted the dead animals into her womb prior to delivery.
	www.signonsandiego.com /news/features/20021009-9999_1c9mythansrs.html (700 words)

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