In June 1941, a Surrey-based doctor, Edward Fyfe Griffith, wrote to the medical historian, Reginald Cecil Bligh Wall to say that he had ‘come across the story of Mary Toft of Godalming’, dating from 1726. Griffith was in the process of compiling an anthology of medical writing and he eagerly informed Wall ‘I am now writing her up’. As a historian of early modern Britain, I was immediately drawn to...