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The attribution cited by Nicolson and Rousseau is to be found in a scrapbook held by the Royal Society of Medicine, "Toft (Mary), the celebrated pretended Breeder of Rabbits. A Collection of 10 Tracts relative to this most extraordinary Imposture, with a few MS. Extracts" (L. 7. C. 24/19582). This scrapbook contains printed pamphlets, handwritten copies of songs and poems, and extracts from newspapers and books, all relating to the Mary Toft affair. Among these is "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," transcribed, according to a note at the foot of the page, from A New Miscellany. In the upper right-hand corner of this copy of the poem, someone has written "by John Arbuthnot."
Unfortunately, too little is known about this attribution to use it to establish Arbuthnot's authorship of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," for neither
The first page of the scrapbook has this statement of provenance: "Sam. Merriman M. D. Half Moon Street purchased this volume at the sale of Dr. Combe's Books for £ 3.10.0." Underneath, in a different hand, is written, "I succeeded to it at a cost of £ 2.5.0 S. Wm. J. Merriman M. D. Charles Street Westbourne Terrace."
Dr. Combe is Charles Combe, M. D. (1743-1817). He received a degree of doctor of medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1783 and the next year was admitted by the College of Physicians a licentiate in midwifery. In 1789, he was elected physician to the British Lying-in Hospital where, in 1810, he was appointed consulting physician. Dr. Combe was a scholar and antiquarian (he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1771 and to the Royal Society in 1776). On his death, much of his valuable materia medica was acquired by the College of Physicians.[2] Sam. Merriman, who purchased the Toft scrapbook on Combe's death, is Samuel Merriman, M. D. (1771-1852). Like Combe, he specialized in midwifery. In 1808, he was appointed physician-accoucheur and, in 1815, consulting physician-accoucheur to the Westminster General Dispensary, and he later held a similar position at Middlesex Hospital. Like Combe, too, he was a scholar: he wrote about the history of his profession and collected biographical information on medical and scientific men. S. Wm. J. Merriman, to whom the Toft collection passed next, is Samuel William John Merriman (1814-1873), the son of Samuel Merriman; in 1847, he was appointed consulting physician to the Westminster General Dispensary and, in 1849, physician to the Royal Infirmary for Children.[3] Shortly after his death, the scrapbook was acquired by the Royal Society of Medicine, where it has continued to be held to this day.[4]
It is difficult to know which of these three men made the attribution—or, for that matter, whether any of them did. The transcription of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" was done in a careful hand and obviously was meant to be a permanent item in the scrapbook. The handwriting is nothing like Combe's. It could be Samuel Merriman's, but there are sufficient differences between the careful hand of the transcript and the specimens of the casual hand of Merriman that I have seen that I cannot be certain. The question of the handwriting aside, the elder Samuel Merriman is the most likely of the three men to have trancribed the poem. He took considerable interest in the Mary Toft incident, making extensive notes on the affair and publishing an article in The Gentleman's Magazine in which he identified the medical men involved in the case whom Hogarth satirized in his print Cunicularii.[5] And transcriptions of other Mary Toft material in the scrapbook appear to have been made by him. Still, since the evidence of the handwriting is not conclusive, we cannot be certain that he is the one who copied "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" out of A New Miscellany. And further, the younger Merriman's
At any rate, whoever transcribed the poem did not necessarily make the attribution. The attribution was made sometime after the poem was copied. It is in pencil, scrawled aslant the page, thus spoiling the neat appearance of the ink transcription. It appears to have been written hurriedly, perhaps with an unsteady hand or on an unsteady surface. As a consequence, it is difficult to determine whether the hand that wrote the attribution was the hand that made the transcription. To my eye, there is nothing in the short, carelessly scrawled phrase "by John Arbuthnot" that allows us definitively to identify it with the hand of any one of the three men or to exclude the possibility that any one of them may have written it.
There are other complications to the matter of who made the attribution. First, the attribution could have been added after the scrapbook passed from the hands of the younger Merriman. Secondly, it is possible that the Toft scrapbook was owned by someone other than Combe and the Merrimans. The Mary Toft incident occurred in 1726. Charles Combe was born in 1743, and even if he began collecting the material as a young man, the earliest he would have come into possession of it would have been nearly forty years after the event. The printed tracts in the scrapbook were published between December 1726 and February 1727, and by their nature they were ephemeral. Combe's being able to gather all these fugitive tracts piecemeal so long after their publication is less likely than his obtaining an already existing collection, one made much nearer the events of 1726.[7] If some previous form of the scrapbook did exist, the transcription of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" could have been added as early as 1730 (when the poem was published in A New Miscellany) and the attribution made any time thereafter by someone who possessed the transcription before Dr. Combe.
In short, the attribution found in the Royal Society of Medicine scrapbook is of dubious value. On the basis of the handwriting alone, we must conclude that it was written by an unknown person at an unknown time. Even if we assume that it was made by the elder Samuel Merriman, who of the three men took the most active interest in the Mary Toft affair, he probably did not transcribe the poem until he acquired the scrapbook in 1817, nearly one hundred years after the event. Whatever the case, it is impossible to know on what basis "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" was attributed to Dr. Arbuthnot.
There does exist, however, an earlier attribution, one made by a man whose identity we know and made on a date we can be fairly certain of. Among the papers of Dr. James Douglas in the Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow is a transcription of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" (Douglas Papers D336). It is written on both sides of a single sheet. One side contains the first stanza of the poem, and beneath it is written "Bunnys Dad by Dr Arbuthnot." On the other side are the remaining four stanzas and, in
Douglas's attribution must be taken seriously, for he was deeply involved in the Mary Toft incident and he was in a position to know if Arbuthnot wrote "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife."
When Mary Toft first claimed to be giving birth to rabbits, she duped a local surgeon, John Howard, who moved her near his home in Guildford so he could observe her closely. Soon reports about the monstrous births began to reach London. By November, rumors had grown so numerous and interest so intense that George I sent two representatives to investigate the woman's story, first Nathanael St. André, surgeon and anatomist to the Royal Household, and several days later Cyriacus Ahlers, surgeon to His Majesty's German household. The two came away with opposite opinions, St. André believing that Mary Toft's births were truly monstrous, Ahlers thinking the whole business a fraud. George I sent St. André to Guildford again, this time accompanied by Sir Richard Manningham, a physician then much in vogue, to bring the woman to London.
Mary Toft arrived in London on 29 November and was lodged at Mr. Lacy's bagnio. St. André immediately called in Dr. Douglas to examine her. Douglas was one of the most respected anatomists and men-midwives in London. He had already received a handsome gift from the king for his anatomical researches, and within a year he would become Physician Extraordinary to Queen Caroline. Member of the Royal Society, Honorary Fellow of the College of Physicians, friend of Cheselden, Mead, and Sloane, later teacher of William Hunter, Douglas embodied professional respectability. But if St. André had called Douglas into the case to bolster his own position that Mary Toft was giving birth to rabbits, he was severely disappointed. Douglas disbelieved her claims from the beginning and had said so publicly. Manningham, too, thought that the affair was a cheat, and the two doctors joined to expose the woman. Luckily, on the evening of 3 December, the porter at the bagnio was caught trying to sneak a rabbit to Mary Toft. She had, he admitted, bribed him to do so. Douglas and Manningham used this evidence to press her to confess. At first she resisted, but on the morning of 7 December she gave in, and by the ninth she was in Bridewell.[8]
The incident, however, was scarcely over. Trying to disentangle themselves from the affair, the medical men began to bring out explanations, accusations, defenses, and disclaimers. This spectacle of "the Gentlemen of the faculty," as one newspaper put it, "flinging their bitter pills at one another, to convince the world that none of them understand any thing of the matter"[9] was too much for the London public, who began to suspect that the doctors had been taken in by the fraud or, even worse, had had a hand in perpetrating it. Immediately the town was awash in satires, and nearly every-one who had been involved in the affair was attacked. Even Manningham,
Douglas, however, escaped being satirized. But he became apprehensive when Manningham published on 12 December An Exact Diary of what was observ'd during a Close Attendance upon Mary Toft, the pretended Rabbet-Breeder of Godalming in Surrey.[11] Douglas considered himself to be misrepresented in Manningham's pamphlet, and he started writing his own version of events, which he eventually published as An Advertisement Occasion'd by Some Passages in Sir. R. Manningham's Diary Lately Publish'd. In the process of drawing up this self-defense, Douglas began to collect much of the printed Mary Toft material and to copy advertisements, extracts from newspapers and pamphlets, and satirical poems. Among these was "Bunnys Dad by Dr Arbuthnot." Douglas's date of 16 December must refer either to the day he copied the poem or to the date on the manuscript he copied from.[12]
Did Douglas know that Arbuthnot wrote the poem? The two men were acquainted, both having left Scotland to become respected members of the small circle of London physicians. And Arbuthnot, like Douglas, took an interest in the happenings in the bagnio. On 3 December, Lord Hervey wrote to Henry Fox that "I was last Night to see [Mary Toft] with Dr. Arbuthnot."[13] Arbuthnot was at the bagnio earlier that same day, too, and we are fortunate enough that in one of his early drafts of An Advertisement Douglas recorded a meeting on that day between himself and Arbuthnot: "Friday nothing remarkable, but that in about noon I was denyd admittance when I wanted to see her, Mr Howard and Mr St Andre being both abroad; Sir Richd Manningham (which I thought lookd very strange) justifyd the maid in refusing to open the Door. This I told Dr Arbuthnot & others who was by that I was affraid something was hatching who were all of my opinion."[14] None of this proves that Dr. Arbuthnot wrote "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," of course. But when Douglas attributed the poem to him, an acquaintance who was privy to the details of the Mary Toft affair, he could have done so on the basis of something more substantial than a blind guess.
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