No, it's the strange case of Mary Toft and her rabbit babies, a real-life incident that left a mark on medical history. It was the beginning of the end for an idea about birth defects that seems ridiculous today but was widely believed in the past.

It made Mary Toft a sensation in England in 1726. She got a whirlwind of media publicity, which promoted her as an object of jokes, shame and national embarrassment. The Toft affair cast England's most famous doctors - not its politicians - in a bad light.

Toft didn't give birth to a rabbit. She had at least 16, according to her doctors.

When the remarkable events occurred, Toft was 25, married and working as a servant in Godalming, England. Despite a miscarriage in August, Toft still seemed pregnant. She went into apparent labor and Dr. John Howard, the local medico, arrived to assist.

To Howard's astonishment, she delivered one rabbit, then another and another - all born dead. Still she seemed pregnant.

Howard dispatched letters to England's greatest doctors and scientists asking for help to investigate the sensation. Among those who hurried to Godalming were Nathaniel St. Andre, surgeon-anatomist to King George I, and Richard Manningham, the most famous obstetrician in London.

Toft gave birth to more dead rabbits in their presence.

Yes, there were hints of something amiss. The rabbits, for instance, had no umbilical cords - the lifelines that connect a fetus to its mother's blood supply. Toft never delivered the placentas, or "afterbirth" that attaches to the umbilical cord.

Tests on some of the rabbits showed air in their lungs, meaning they had breathed air before dying.

Nevertheless, St. Andre declared the births genuine, and published his findings as the long-sought proof for the hypothesis of "maternal impressions."

Toft claimed that during pregnancy she had an intense craving for roast rabbit. She tried to catch rabbits in the garden, admired them in the village market, dreamed about rabbits.

St Andre moved Toft to an elegant apartment in London, where she became a social sensation. Cable TV news talk-show producers would have clamored to sign her on.

Toft also became the center of a debate among scientists and philosophers about maternal impressions.

Material impressions was medicine's explanation for birth defects. It contended that a pregnant woman's experiences could be imprinted directly on the fetus.

Moms startled by a loud sound during pregnancy might give birth to a child with hearing impairments. If a child is born with a red birth mark, that's because mom picked strawberries during pregnancy. Look at a blind person, and your baby may be born blind.

The maternal-impressions hypothesis took a big hit when Toft's story unraveled. First, villagers confessed that they supplied her with baby rabbits. Then Toft admitted that she planted dead rabbits for the doctors to discover.

Her motive: Fame and fortune from selling her story.

St. Andre and other backers of the hypothesis became national laughingstocks. But lessons from Troth's rabbit babies faded, and the maternal-impressions notion lived on. Doctors used it as an explanation for birth defects throughout the 19th century.

Joseph Merrick blamed his condition on an incident in which Mom was almost trampled by an elephant during pregnancy. Merrick, immortalized as "The Elephant Man," was disfigured by a disease called Proteus Syndrome.

Even in the 20th century, women in some countries tried to avoid looking at individuals with physical disabilities or birthmarks, for fear of harming their unborn child.