In September 1726, Mary Toft, a young, illiterate woman from
Godalming, Surrey, announced that she was giving birth to rabbits. Her
claim was taken seriously by a large number of people, including members
of the medical profession, and for two months the affair was the subject of
intense interest and speculation in London. In December, Toft confessed
that her story was a lie, and London suddenly was innundated with satires
ridiculing those gullible enough to have been taken in by the woman:
sarcastic factual accounts, facetious accounts that claimed to be factual,
mock suicide notes, false confessions, poems, ballads, engravings,
pamphlets, and squibs.
Among this flood was "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," a short poem
poking fun at some of the men involved in the Mary Toft affair. The poem
circulated in manuscript and was not published until 1730, anonymously,
in A New Miscellany.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau have called attention to
what they took to be an eighteenth-century attribution of "The
Rabbit-Man-Midwife" to Dr. John Arbuthnot.[1] However, they did not press for
Dr.
Arbuthnot's authorship of the poem. Since Nicolson and Rousseau have
written, a new, very early attribution has come to light, and this, together
with internal evidence from the poem, allows us to argue that Dr.
Arbuthnot very probably wrote "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife."
