The Surgeon Who Believed

Nathaniel St André was surgeon-anatomist to King George I, a Swiss-born royal favourite with a steady hand. In November 1726 the King sent him to Guildford to examine a poor clothier's wife who was reportedly giving birth to rabbits.

He believed her.

He stood over Mary Toft as she produced the heads, the legs, the eel-backbone fragments, the rabbit packed inside a cat. He noted, in cold print, that one specimen "leap'd twenty three Hours in the Uterus before it dy'd." He moved her to a London bath-house for round-the-clock observation. He sat down and wrote a forty-page pamphlet, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, and rushed it to the printers. It went through three editions in a week. Four days after publication, Mary confessed.

The pamphlet became, overnight, the most expensive piece of paper of his career. He lost the royal post. Hogarth drew him as a fool. He married the widow of the colleague who had stood beside him in Guildford, amid the obvious rumour. A fire later took what was left.

He lived to ninety-six. He died in a Southampton almshouse in 1776, half a century after Godalming.

In those fifty years, he never ate rabbit again.