In 1726 a surgeon to the royal household believed an Englishwoman was giving birth to rabbits.
Mary Toft fooled doctors for weeks before confessing in London.
The event
More amazing facts
- 1721 Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.
- 1722 · 1795 The Chinese emperor Qianlong abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather.
- 1729 Voltaire got rich by beating the state lottery.
- 1729 · 1762 Catherine the Great was born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in the Prussian port of Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland.
- 1730 · 1755 The founder of Moscow University walked to Moscow.
- 1731 · 1739 Britain and Spain fought for nine years over a severed ear. Spaniards cut off Captain Jenkins's ear in 1731; after he told Parliament about it, war broke out in 1739.