... And then she popped out most of a rabbit.

I was going to preface this with a content warning, but I'm not really sure the words "uterus meat clown car" would make sense to anyone.

Just follow me on this.

Mary Toft was, for all intents and purposes, wholly unremarkable. Under different circumstances, she might have managed to remain so.

She was a serving woman from Surrey and, as with many others like her, she could neither read nor write. Her life was not marked with lofty ambitions -- she married a journeyman clothier from a once-prominent family, and had three children. Unfortunately, her fourth pregnancy didn't quite go as planned. Mary began suffering from painful complications early on, requiring the help of her neighbor, Mary Gill, until her mother-in-law could arrive to care for her.

And that's when everything became terrible.

See, Mary wasn't actually carrying a human baby. Instead, she delivered a thing that, for all intents and purposes, looked like a skinned cat or that baboon from The Fly. Understandably concerned by this turn of events, her family sent for an expert to figure out exactly why mild-mannered Mary Toft's vagina had apparently turned into a hellmouth.

Enter obstetrician John Howard.

When he showed up, he was treated to the sight of several dismembered animal parts that Toft had birthed. The day after, there were even more. In fact, Toft kept popping out bits of dead animals for an entire month, culminating in the delivery of an entire litter of nine dead rabbit kits.

To say that Toft became somewhat of a local celebrity might be a bit of an understatement. The King sent two investigators to see what was going on, including his own royal surgeon, Nathaniel St. André. There were even more dead rabbits by the time they arrived, but they still had the questionable privilege of witnessing the birth of several others. St. André was certain the births were legitimate -- somehow, Toft was actually managing to give birth to dead rabbits!

Toft blamed it on a phenomenon called maternal impression, claiming that being startled by a rabbit had triggered a lapine obsession that caused her to miscarry and subsequently deliver a whole mess of dead bunnies. While this might sound questionable, at best, to modern ears, it was an idea that stuck around for a surprisingly long period of time. When Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was still exhibited as a sideshow curiosity in the late 1800s, his appearance was blamed on his mother being frightened by an elephant while pregnant. Even now, a surprising number of first-time mothers need reassurance that a sudden stress or fright won't cause health problems in a developing fetus.

Skeptical, the King ordered St. André to bring Toft to London for closer observation and further examination. This time, they were accompanied by yet another obstetrician -- Richard Manningham. He had the opportunity to examine one of the mysterious blobs of flesh Toft had birthed, before coming to the conclusion that it was actually a hog bladder (complete with pig urine, which is generally in short supply in a human uterus). At this point, all of the esteemed medical doctors agreed that mentioning this to anyone was, in all likelihood, a really, really bad idea.

After Toft was relocated, the examinations continued. John Maubray, a man wholly devoted to testing his medical theories, was particularly excited about getting to examine her. However, Maubray also thought that sitting too close to a stove would make you give birth to a small, mouselike creature, so these were probably less "theories" than they were "completely bonkers medical fanfic."

Eventually, it came to light that Mr. Toft, the clothier, had been buying his wife a large number of rabbits. Everyone involved vehemently denied that the rabbits were for anything other than eating, but this did not hold up very well in light of the fact that rabbits were somehow disappearing from dinner and reappearing in her ladygarden. Finally, Toft caved and admitted that, right after her miscarriage, she had allowed someone to stick a rabbits head and several dead cat parts into her uterus. After her body recovered from the miscarriage and her cervix no longer allowed objects to be inserted past it, the parts had been placed in her vagina instead, essentially turning her reproductive system into the world's worst Kinder Surprise egg.

I'll give you a minute.

Still here? Okay.

After this came out, the medical profession was, shall we say, displeased. St. André and Maubray's reputations as doctors of human people were severely damaged by the revelation that they thought a woman could give birth to entire litters of rabbits for months at a time. In fact, St. André had only just published a manuscript titled A short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbets perform'd by Mr. John Howard, surgeon at Guilford literally days before Toft confessed. Several doctors who had nothing to do with Maubray's weird theories were suddenly compelled to decry them and denounce Maubray, because it was absolutely vital that they distance themselves as much as possible from the stunning quackery that had allowed Toft to gain notoriety in the first place.

As for Mary, she was briefly imprisoned. Once authorities came to the conclusion that "tricking an entire country and several established medical professionals by sticking dead rabbits in your cooter" wasn't technically illegal, they released her without charging her with anything. She returned to obscurity, surfacing only once to be arrested for receiving stolen goods (which, unlike the whole rabbit thing, was actually illegal), and died at the age of 62.