‘The Doctor's in Labour; or a New Whim Wham from Guildford’

Cody, Lisa Forman

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.1992.tb00055.x

Cited by 7 publications

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“…As Lisa Cody has demonstrated, in the absence of clear medical proof, the several doctors involved in the case instead relied upon the word and regarded Mary Toft as 'the sole authority and author of fact'. 15 Cody acknowledges that Toft got nothing from the hoax and hints that she was ruled by others, but regards portions of Toft's confessions as 'probably fabricated' and concludes that we 'will never really know how or why Mary conceived her project'. 16 Dennis Todd dismisses the confessions as a simple exercise in dissembling: the hoax was 'motivated solely by money', he claims, and Toft must have been 'devoted' to it.…”

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confidence: 99%

What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body: Fig. 1.

Harvey

2015

Hist Workshop J

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In autumn 1726, Mary Toft began to deliver rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case became a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures. Toft was attended by at least six different doctors, some members of the Royal College of Physicians or attached to the Royal Court, but no doctor declared the affair a hoax until Toft herself confessed on 7 December 1726. This article focuses on Toft’s three surviving confessions in order to explore not the doctors or even wider representations of the affair but instead the person of Mary Toft herself. These rare sources give rare insight into one woman’s experiences of reproduction in the early eighteenth century. The essay engages with recent work on recovering women’s voices in the past, reconstructing Mary Toft’s words and her embodied and affective experience of the affair. These documents suggest a revision to our understanding of the hoax of 1726, one that situates the affair not in the context of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment or the assumption of men’s control over midwifery, but instead in the context of power dynamics amongst women in the practices of early-modern reproduction and birth.

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confidence: 99%