author
Nathanael St. André
1680–1776
A Swiss-born physician who made his career in England, he is remembered less for quiet medical work than for one of the strangest scandals in 18th-century medicine. His name became tied to the notorious Mary Toft rabbit-birth hoax, a case that badly damaged his reputation.
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About the author
Born in Switzerland around 1680, St. André moved to England while still young and built a varied career before turning fully to medicine. Accounts of his early life say he supported himself by teaching languages, dancing, and fencing, and he later became a physician and surgeon attached to the royal household of King George I.
He is best known for his part in the Mary Toft affair in 1726. St. André believed Toft's sensational claim that she had given birth to rabbits, and he published an account defending the case. When the story was exposed as a fraud, he became a target of public ridicule, and the episode followed him for the rest of his life.
Even so, his story remains a vivid window into the medical world of his time: ambitious, theatrical, and still struggling to separate careful observation from credulity. He died in March 1776.