MARY TOFT; OR, THE RABBIT QUEEN

career, an uneventful daily routine of tending to infections, delivering babies, and setting broken bones. But his life becomes suddenly complicated when he encounters Mary Toft, a patient who appears to be afflicted by a disease with a supernatural origin: she is more than half mad; she sometimes weeps blood; and most importantly, she gives birth to a rabbit once every two or three days. Is this a hoax, or the medical case of the century? In 1726, in England, it is difficult to say, for it is common knowledge that a woman’s imagination while pregnant can alter the shape of her child in sometimes monstrous ways, and all people know it to be true that sinning women have often been punished by God in just such a fashion. As news of the sensational case spreads, from Godalming to London, from the community of England’s surgeons to the ears of King George himself, John Howard, his apprentice Zachary Walsh, and Mary Toft find themselves bound together in an event whose consequences soon escape their control. A mix of comedy, history, philosophy, and horror, Mary Toft raises the question of how we know what is true in a world in which, as Jonathan Swift said in 1710, “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” and how we distinguish what we know to be true from what, against our better judgment, we dearly wish to believe.