S5 Ep19: Mary Toft and Her "Miraculous" Rabbits

Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

True Crime, Society & Culture, Science

4.1 • 10K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Poor Mary Toft,
Her Judgement was off,
Or perhaps she thought it'd be funny,
The doctors were men,
Shocked again and again,
Each time she gave birth to a bunny.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Poor Mary Toffed, her judgment was off, or perhaps she thought it'd be funny.
0:10.9	The doctors were men, shocked again and again, each time she gave birth to a bunny.
0:19.6	Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm no pregnancy expert,
0:25.3	but I am a doula, and I have been pregnant twice and given birth once. I've also taken
0:31.1	human reproduction 101, so I like to think I have a pretty good understanding of what all
0:36.1	goes on in there.
0:43.5	The subjects of today's episode may not have had the luxury of a formal education, or, for those who did, they lived in a time in which people still believed women's body parts picked up and hitchhiked
0:49.7	around their bodies willy-nilly, so I suppose a certain amount of ignorance was forgivable.
0:56.2	But it's hard to imagine how, even with just a rudimentary understanding of biology,
1:02.4	the folks in today's story allowed themselves to be swept up into a ruse as improbable as Mary Toft and her rabbit babies.
1:11.8	And just a warning before we jump in, this story is pretty gross.
1:16.5	As per usual, I won't be overly graphic or disgusting,
1:20.0	but if you're a fan of baby bunnies, I urge you to proceed with caution.
1:42.9	Music with caution. Mary Denier was born into hard times. It was the early 18th century in Surrey, about 30 miles from central London,
1:52.0	and things were not easy for the laboring class, can you imagine. By the time she was 24 in 1726,
2:00.0	Mary was married to Joshua Toft, whose profession is described by an entry on the Grub Street Project website as a journeyman clothier, which I can only assume means he made clothes for people who traveled a lot, or he traveled a lot selling his clothes, it doesn't matter.
2:19.2	Mary was working as a servant and had at least two living children, though one account says she had at least three children,
2:25.3	only one of which was still alive by 1726. Mary supplemented the household income by working for
2:32.8	local farms, earning a penny a day.
2:36.3	Look, I'm not even going to bother to calculate that into today money, but I'm willing to bet at least a penny that a penny a day was not really anything to live on.
2:45.4	Like I said, times were tough.
2:50.5	As with any story from this long ago, accounts differ. In some accounts, in August of that year,
	...

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