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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."
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