Futility Closet - 208-Giving Birth to Rabbits

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

In 1726 London was rocked by a bizarre sensation: A local peasant woman began giving birth to rabbits, astounding the city and baffling the medical community. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the strange case of Mary Toft, which has been called "history's most fascinating medical mystery." We'll also ponder some pachyderms and puzzle over some medical misinformation. Intro: The notion of music without substance raises some perplexing philosophical puzzles. Japanese haiku master Masaoka Shiki wrote nine verses about baseball. Sources for our feature on Mary Toft: Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England, 1995. Clifford A. Pickover, The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery, 2000. Richard Gordon, Great Medical Mysteries, 1984. Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons, 2005. Wendy Moore, "Of Rabbit and Humble Pie," British Medical Journal 338 (May 7, 2009). Palmira Fontes da Costa, "The Medical Understanding of Monstrous Births at the Royal Society of London During the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26:2 (2004), 157-175. Lawrence Segel, "What's Up, Doc?" Medical Post 39:11 (March 18, 2003), 37. Glennda Leslie, "Cheat and Impostor: Debate Following the Case of the Rabbit Breeder," Eighteenth Century 27:3 (Fall 1986), 269-286. Bill Bynum, "Maternal Impressions," Lancet 359:9309 (March 9, 2002), 898. Dolores Peters, "The Pregnant Pamela: Characterization and Popular Medical Attitudes in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies 14:4 (Summer 1981), 432-451. S.A. Seligman, "Mary Toft -- The Rabbit Breeder," Medical History 5:4 (1961), 349-360. Charles Green Cumston, "The Famous Case of Mary Toft, the Pretended Rabbit Breeder of Godalming," American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children 68:2 (August 1913), 274-300. Nathaniel Saint-André, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform'd by Mr John Howard, Surgeon at Guilford, 1727. Sir Richard Manningham, An Exact Diary of What Was Observ'd During a Close Attendance Upon Mary Toft, the Pretended Rabbet-Breeder of Godalming in Surrey, From Monday Nov. 28, to Wednesday Dec. 7 Following, 1726. Cyriacus Ahlers, Some Observations Concerning the Woman of Godlyman in Surrey, 1726. Thomas Brathwaite, Remarks on a Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform'd by Mr. John Howard, Surgeon at Guilford, 1726. A Letter From a Male Physician in the Country, to the Author of the Female Physician in London; Plainly Shewing, That for Ingenuity, Probity, and Extraordinary Productions, he Far Surpasses the Author of the Narrative, 1726. The Several Depositions of Edward Costen, Richard Stedman, John Sweetapple, Mary Peytoe, Elizabeth Mason, and Mary Costen; Relating to the Affair of Mary Toft, of Godalming in the County of Surrey, Being Deliver'd of Several Rabbits, 1727. Jonathan Swift, The Anatomist Dissected: or the Man-Midwife Finely Brought to Bed, 1727. "Merry Tuft," Much Ado About Nothing: or, a Plain Refutation of All That Has Been Written or Said Concerning the Rabbit-Woman of Godalming, 1727. "Full and Impartial Relation and Detection of the Rabbit Imposture &c.," The Political State of Great Britain 32:12 (December 1726), 572-602. Edward White, "An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits," Paris Review, July 5, 2016. Listener mail: Rasnov Fortress, Romania Tourism (accessed July 5, 2018). Wikipedia, "Rasnov Citadel" (accessed July 5, 2018). Wikipedia, "Polybius" (accessed July 5, 2018). "Polybius," Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed July 5, 2018). "The British Alpine Hannibal Expedition," John Hoyte (accessed July 5, 2018). Wikipedia, "War Elephant" (accessed July 5, 2018). "Battle of the Trebbia River," Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed July 5, 2018). Philip Ball, "The Truth About Hannibal's Route Across the Alps," Guardian, April 3, 2016. Paul Rodgers, "Tracing Hannibal's Elephants -- With Dung," Forbes, April 5, 2016. Franz Lidz, "How (and Where) Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?" Smithsonian, July 2017. Michael B. Charles and Peter Rhodan, "'Magister Elephantorvm': A Reappraisal of Hannibal's Use of Elephants," The Classical World 100:4 (Summer 2007), 363-389. S. O'Bryhim, "Hannibal's Elephants and the Crossing of the Rhône," The Classical Quarterly 41:1 (1991), 121-125. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Benjamin Busser, who was inspired by the "Peter Weinberger" episode of the Casefile podcast. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from silent music to baseball haiku. This is episode 208. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1726, London was rocked by a bizarre sensation. A local peasant woman began giving birth to rabbits, astounding the city and baffling the medical community.

In today's show, we'll review the strange case of Mary Toft, which has been called history's most fascinating medical mystery. We'll also ponder some pachyderms and puzzle over some medical misinformation. On September 27, 1726, Mary Toft gave birth to a monster. Mary was a poor field worker in the village of Godalming in southern England. She'd been pregnant earlier that year but had miscarried the previous month. Now, when the midwife arrived, she found Mary writhing in pain and saw something fall into a pot between her legs. The doctors who examined it later found a misshapen mass of flesh, including a tiny backbone. After discussing the matter with their neighbors, Mary and her husband, Joshua, sent the monstrous birth to John Howard, a midwife and obstetrician in

Guilford. Howard was skeptical, but he came to see Mary the following day. She delivered several more pieces of flesh during his visit, but Howard couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. He said he wouldn't be convinced that these births were genuine until he delivered the head of the monster. He went back to Guilford, and for two weeks things were relatively quiet. But in the first week of October, the family sent for him again, and he helped Mary deliver the head of a rabbit. This was astonishing, but Mary had an explanation. She said that in April, when she'd been five weeks pregnant, she'd been weeding the garden when two rabbits had hopped in front of her. She tried to catch them, but failed. That night she dreamed she was in a field with the rabbits in her lab, and she awoke with an intense

craving for rabbit meat. She believed her desire for rabbit was so strong that it had affected her reproductive organs. That sounds strange to us, but it was a prevailing belief in the 18th century that a woman's thoughts and mental images during pregnancy could influence her child's physical characteristics. It's called maternal impression. If a child was born with a cleft lip, this was because the mother had been startled by hairs. It was said that one girl was hairy because her mother had been fascinated by a picture of a hairy saint in her bedroom. Similar experiences could explain birthmarks, an odd number of fingers, or other abnormalities in a baby. In one early book for midwives, the Scottish physician John Mabre had warned women away from, quote, playing with

dogs, squirrels, apes, etc., as this could affect their babies. He wrote, if a mouse, rat, weasel, or cat leaps suddenly upon a woman that is conceived, or if an apple, pear, or cherry fall upon any part of her body, the mark of the thing is instantly imprinted on the fetus. This notion helped to convince Howard that Mary's story was genuine. Over the next few days, Mary gave birth to a series of dead rabbits, many of them torn into pieces. By early November, she was giving birth to nearly a rabbit a day. Howard wrote to friends, physicians, and noblemen about what he was seeing. Every time Mary delivered, he imagined he could feel rabbits squirming through her fallopian tubes and uterus.

Crowds of people began to come to Mary's home to see the rabbits. When word of all this reached the court of the king, George I, he ordered Samuel Molyneux, the secretary to the Prince of Wales, to find out whether the strange births were genuine. He'd be accompanied by the court anatomist, Nataniel Santandra. After Mary had delivered her ninth rabbit, Howard had moved her from Godalming to his home in Surrey, so that's where Molyneux and Santandra went. Shortly after they arrived, Mary delivered her 15th rabbit, a skinned animal that appeared to be about four months old and was accompanied by no placenta or umbilical cord. Still, Santandre was intrigued. He suggested to Molyneux that they study the lungs by submerging them in water. Santandre wrote, I instantly cut off a piece

of lungs and tried them in water. They seemed but just specifically lighter than it, and Mr. Molyneux, pressing them to the bottom, found they rose again very slowly. At this, they should have concluded that the rabbit had been breathing before it died and couldn't possibly have developed inside Mary's uterus. Instead, Santandre declared that the rabbit was preternatural and didn't follow the known laws of physics. He decided that there were inequalities in Mary's fallopian tubes and that the rabbits were bred in the tubes and entered her uterus during labor. Howard had preserved the 14 previous births in alcohol and displayed them in a sort of medical museum in his house. All of them had been delivered in pieces, and Howard believed this was because

they had been torn apart by Mary's strong uterine contractions. As they were talking, Mary went into labor again, less than two hours after her last delivery. Within minutes, she gave birth to the lower portion of a male rabbit, one that fit perfectly with the portion she'd delivered earlier that day. When Santadre and Molyneux dissected this lower portion, they found pellets in its rectum. They should have recognized that as common dung and again concluded that the rabbit couldn't have developed in Mary's womb, but instead Sant'Andre took this as evidence that the case was preternatural. Later that night, Mary went into labor again and it took five people to hold her down. Sant'Andre claimed that he examined her carefully throughout to eliminate any chance of trickery.

After several minutes, she delivered a mass of fur rolled up in a ball. Ten minutes later, she gave birth to a rabbit's head with a fur still attached. One ear was missing. Santandre insisted on bringing the specimens back to London to show the king and the prince of Wales. The next day, in London, Santandre and Molyneux dissected them together so they could compare them to ordinary rabbits. Their bodies were the size of two- to four-month-old rabbits except for the first birth, the monster, whose parts resembled those of a cat. But Santandre described them as preternatural fetuses that could not have been bred in a natural way, and he said he suspected no fraud. We don't know what King George thought about all

this, but word of the strange birth shot through London. The king asked the German surgeon Syriacus Ahlers to investigate further, and Ahlers arrived in Guilford on November 20th. Ahlers suspected a hoax from the start, but he kept that to himself. When Howard brought him to Mary, she just delivered a rabbit skin, and he found very little blood or fluid on it. Mary didn't seem pregnant. Her stomach wasn't swollen, and her breasts gave no milk. He grew even more suspicious when he found her pulse was normal

and she walked into the room holding her legs together as if, he said, she were afraid something might drop down which she did not care to lose. When Mary seemed to go into labor, Howard pulled out some flesh and broken bones, apparently the hind end of a rabbit. Ahlers asked Howard why all the rabbits Mary was producing were skinned and Howard answered that her womb's unnaturally strong convulsive motions were rubbing the rabbits against Mary's pubic bone and removing the skin. Ahlers brought the rabbit parts back with him to

London, where he found they'd been cut into pieces with a knife and couldn't have been torn apart by Mary's contractions. And in some of them, he found pellets of hard dung which contained hay, straw, and corn. On November 21st, he told the king that he strongly suspected a hoax, and he showed the rabbit specimens as evidence. The king asked the obstetrician Sir Richard Manningham to visit Mary. When he found no signs of pregnancy, and when Howard showed him the placenta of her latest rabbit child, Manningham said that it looked more like half a hog's bladder. He pointed out that it smelled of urine. When he compared it to an actual hog's bladder, he found the resemblance so great that he grew very suspicious.

Howard and Santandra admitted the resemblance but urged him to be more patient, and he agreed to postpone making any report until they had investigated further. On November 29th, Mary was moved to a public bath in London so she could be studied in a controlled setting. Santandra invited the respected anatomist James Douglas, who felt Mary's abdomen and said the pulsations were just contractions of the abdominal muscles, not the motions that a woman experiences in labor. He proposed that they wait until a rabbit was born, since no one could deliver one to her secretly in the bathhouse. She was kept under constant surveillance night and day, and the mysterious birth stopped. Douglas and Manningham prepared to announce that the whole

thing had been a hoax, but Santandre and Howard begged them to wait. Mary eventually reported some labor pains, but Douglas thought they were faked. And now there was an important discovery outside. The justice of the peace, Lord Thomas Onslow, had discovered that Joshua Toft, Mary's husband, had been visiting local rabbit sellers to buy young rabbits during his wife's pregnancies. He claimed these were for Mary to eat, but Mrs. Mason, the owner of the house where Mary had stayed, said she'd never once cooked a rabbit for Mary during her stay there. Onslow found that one rabbit seller had warned Joshua that the rabbits he wanted were too small for eating. Joshua had said, I must have them even if they are small. In another case, Joshua had told a seller that a dead rabbit would have done as well for him as a live one.

Onslow found that Joshua frequently talked to his sister, Margaret, Toft, about Mary and came to believe that Margaret served as an intermediary between husband and wife. And now there was another discovery. Thomas Howard, the porter at the bathhouse, was caught trying to sneak a rabbit into Mary's room. He confessed to Manningham and Douglas that Margaret Toft had talked him into procuring the smallest rabbit he could find. From that moment on, Mary was continuously attacked and pressured to confess. The Justice of the Peace threatened to imprison her, and Manningham and Douglas urged her to confess.

She held out for two days, and then Manningham told her he was, quote, resolved to try a very painful experiment on her, an operation to discover what was causing the births. On the morning of December 7th, she said, I will not go on any longer thus. I shall sooner hang myself. She didn't give a full confession. She said that her mother-in-law, Anne Toft, was responsible for the hoax and that she herself honestly thought she'd been giving birth to rabbits. But that's all that was necessary. She'd admitted that the whole affair was a fraud. On December 8th, Santandre published a retraction and admitted that he now thought Mary had committed a hoax. He promised to write a full account of the discovery of the fraud, but he never did. Many of the other principal players published their own accounts, pointing fingers at each

other, and still more grieved that the scandal had damaged the reputations of all British physicians. It looks like what really happened was this. In the summer of 1726, probably in late August, Mary had a real miscarriage, and the family invented the hoax somewhere around that time. It created the original monster by cutting up a cat and inserting an eel's backbone into its intestines, and Mary pretended to give birth to this on September 27th. When Howard was summoned the next morning, Anne pretended to deliver more pieces of the cat by a sleight of hand, and they hid still more pieces inside Mary for Howard to deliver the next day.

When he said he wouldn't be satisfied until he delivered the head of the monster, they found they'd misplaced the head of the cat and put a rabbit's head inside Mary instead. Howard delivered that and was convinced. They had planned to sustain the hoax with shapeless monsters, but now that Mary had born a rabbit, they were committed to using rabbits. They agreed on the story that she'd seen one and begun to fixate on it, and Howard came to believe that the story was true, partly because of the notion of maternal impression,

and partly because apparently Mary was a very convincing performer. Her miscarriage had left her with signs of pregnancy, she bled often, and her pain was often real. She could set off powerful contractions in her abdomen that lasted for hours at a time, and which people described as leapings and jumpings. And somehow people heard that, quote, the bones of the animal were sensibly heard to snap and break by the violent convulsive motions of the uterus. I've read a lot about this, and I haven't heard anyone explain the sounds, but apparently you could hear sounds that seemed like they were coming from inside her.

In her confession, Mary claimed to be an innocent victim intimidated by her mother-in-law, and Mary said that her husband Joshua was completely innocent and asked that he be left alone. But Joshua had bought many baby rabbits, and the hoax would have been impossible without both of them collaborating. All of this made a great public sensation marked by pamphlets, papers, and ballads. Even Alexander Pope published a bawdy song about it. Mary said she had done all this for the money, quote, to get so good a living that I should never want as long as I lived.

How do you make money giving birth to rabbits? The answer is that England in the 18th century was fascinated with monstrous births. People would pay to attend exhibitions, the well-to-do would hold private viewings, and parents would display their deformed or monstrous children for a price. With so much money to be made, frauds were common. If Mary could convince the public that she was a reliable source of such monsters, she stood to make a lot of money. On December 9th, Mary talked with charge with being a notorious and vile cheat

and thrown into Bridewell, a prison for beggars and tramps. But the case against her was dismissed after a few months. Possibly the authorities thought her time in prison was punishment enough, or maybe they thought that releasing her would help to quiet the public sensation. She returned to her home in Godalming and largely disappeared from history. She died on January 13th, 1763 at age 60. How and where she died and the location of her remains are unknown. As the scandal subsided, Nataniel Sant'Andrea's career declined and he sank into poverty. He retained his title, but the king took away his salary and duties. He died in a poorhouse in 1776

at age 96. It was said that during the last 50 years of his life, he never again ate rabbit. In episode 203, Greg told us about the Woodingdon Well, an almost 1,300-foot-deep well that was arduously dug by hand in East Sussex in the middle of the 19th century. Jono Nienaber from Durban, South Africa, whose last name I have almost certainly just gotten wrong, wrote, Hi all, your story about the hand dug well reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to Romania after our wedding to meet the rest of her family. We visited a small town called Rushnov in Transylvania and there on a mountain we found a fortress. This area is famous for its many castles and fortresses, and in Rushnov Fortress was a 470-foot hand-dug well dug through solid rock. Rushnov Fortress is believed to have been built in the 13th century and was designed to be used as a place of refuge for the local inhabitants during periods of invasion.

As the residents sometimes had to live in the citadel for extended periods of time, possibly as long as decades, the fortress contained a number of houses as well as a school and a chapel. With nine towers, two bastions, and a drawbridge, the citadel was also surrounded by 500-foot slopes on the north, south, and west sides and was only forced to surrender one time in the year 1612 when invaders managed to find the secret route to the fortress's water supply. Realizing that they needed a well inside the fortress, it's said that two Turkish prisoners were given the task of digging a well through solid rock in the center of the citadel with the

promise that they'd be freed once the well was finished. Work on the well began in 1623 and took 17 years to complete, and fulfilled its purpose of allowing the fortress's residents to remain safely inside during a siege. The well was used until 1850 when the wheel on its windlass broke, and this is what is said about the well on the Romania tourism website that Jano sent me the link to. But according to Wikipedia, the fate of the Turkish prisoners actually isn't known, with some saying that they were released as promised and others saying that they were killed after spending 17 years hand digging a well through solid rock. I couldn't find anything more about this topic in English. So if someone has a good source on this story, I'd like to know what happened to the poor prisoners.

Yeah, that's kind of a terrible story either way. 17 years digging through rock. Yeah. And while we're on the subject of things that we don't know for sure, Omer Hertz wrote in about another topic that Greg covered in episode 203. Hi, Greg and Sharon. 203. Hi, Greg and Sharon. Following your latest podcast in which you've mentioned Icy Mike, the elephant that had died on top of Mount Kenya, and your wonder at what he was doing there in the first place, I immediately recalled the most famous incident of elephants crossing mountains, that of Hannibal's invasion of Italy over the Alps during the Second Punic War. I'm sure we've

all heard some version of this tale of audacity and bravery, but it's funny, in a macabre way, to reflect how little most of us actually know about that trek. Namely, that of Hannibal's celebrated war elephants, only a few, a few being by some accounts, including that of my classics professor at university back in the day, as little as a single elephant, ever made it across and into Italy, and not a single one of those were ever used in battle. According to the aforementioned professor, that single elephant died in a bog somewhere in northern Italy, long before it had any chance of seeing a battlefield. While certainly a celebrated feat then, that trek across the Alps was a little less successful than one would think. Thanks again for your podcast. It is always a joy to listen to.

Omer's email made me realize how very little I knew about Hannibal's elephants other than the bare fact of the impressiveness of their crossing the Alps. And after attempting to do a fair amount of research on this topic, I discovered that that bare fact may be the only one that isn't in dispute. I wasn't able to find a great deal about Hannibal's elephants that there is a really clear consensus on, including how many there were and how many survived the trip through the Alps, what route they took, or how they were used or performed in battle. This murkiness about the elephants apparently extends even further. An article in the July 2017 edition of Smithsonian Magazine says,

A Roman emperor once wrote that everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact, and everything we see is a perspective, not the truth, which pretty much sums up our understanding of Hannibal, and goes on to say, we know very little about him for certain, and nearly all of what is known about him and his fantastic gamble over the Alps comes through the filter of his embittered adversaries. fantastic gamble over the Alps comes through the filter of his embittered adversaries. Much of the evidence we have today about Hannibal's elephants comes from their depictions on coins from that period, which have been used to try to determine what kind of elephants they were and how they were equipped, and two accounts by historians that weren't alive at the time of the events, Polybius and Livy. Polybius began writing his famous histories at

least 50 years after Hannibal's Alpine crossing, and at least some of what he wrote, for example, his account of how they got the elephants across the Rhone River, is considered very unlikely to be accurate. Livy was born more than a century and a half after the events. These two accounts have some contradictions between them, and both may have been subject to a certain amount of bias and or misinformation on the part of the author. And plus, there are further disputes about the best translations for some of the language that was used in these ancient texts. What I think can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that in 218 BCE, during the Second Punic War between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian, or Punic, Empire, the Carthaginian army, led by Hannibal, made a daring and unexpected march

through the snowy and treacherous Alps to strike at Rome from the north. And they had with them, at least at the start of the trek, some number of elephants, with many sources saying 37, based on Polybius's account. And although the elephants have been the subject of much debate for many centuries now, and are probably the one thing many people associate with Hannibal, it does seem that it was his decision on which route to take to Italy that was truly noteworthy, not his use of elephants. Elephants had been used in war for at least a century before Hannibal's decision,

and continued to be used for some time after, though presumably no one before Hannibal had been audacious enough to try to take them through the Alps. So no one disputes that much of it, that this actually happened? That appears not to be in dispute. But there is a lot of dispute about how many of Hannibal's elephants survived the trip and what shape they might have been in after the arduous trek, of Hannibal's elephants survived the trip and what shape they might have been in after the arduous trek. Although some have suggested that no elephant survived or that all the elephants survived, the more scholarly sources state that at least some did manage the journey. And though we can't say precisely how many elephants Hannibal still had after crossing the Alps, it does seem that

at least some elephants were used by the Carthaginians in the first major battle of the war at the Trebia River in December 218 BCE. Although Hannibal won that battle against the Romans, it's not clear how much help the elephants actually provided, and it appears that any that were remaining after the battle died in the harsh winter that followed. In 202 BCE, Hannibal commanded the gathering together of another group of elephants to be used at the Battle of Zama in what is now Tunisia. And despite Hannibal's having at least 80 elephants at this battle, the Romans won the battle and finally ended the war with Hannibal's defeat. From the accounts that we have, it appears that the likely inadequately trained elephants were apparently confused and maddened by the Romans' attacks on them and the noise of trumpets and shouting, and many of the beasts ended up trampling parts

of Hannibal's own army, so some have suggested that he would have been better off without any elephants. 80 elephants is a lot of elephants. That's a lot of elephants, but apparently they gathered them together a little too hastily, and it takes a while to train an elephant properly. I guess so. The question of what exact route Hannibal took through the Alps has been hotly debated all the way back to Polybius's time, and at least 12 different routes have been proposed. Many people have gotten very engrossed in this debate over the centuries, and even Napoleon weighed in on the subject. In 1959, John Hoyt, a Cambridge engineering student, was so fired up by the debate that he actually borrowed an elephant named Jumbo from the Turin Zoo and put together an expedition

to try to prove the feasibility of his preferred route, though they ended up having to switch to the one Napoleon favored due to rockfall. Elephants require a great deal of food, so one point that I had seen mentioned several times in my research was the idea that Hannibal's elephants were probably famished by the time they finished their long trek. So I was interested to see that during Hoyt's expedition, which was considerably shorter and less arduous than Hannibal's had been, Jumbo lost about 500 pounds, despite the provisions that had been brought for her. Wow. Yeah, elephants eat hundreds of pounds of food a day. Well, they must have been miserable even if they made it, you know? Yeah, that's what I was saying.

Like, there's some dispute about, like, what condition would they even have been in? Yeah. In the last few years, an international team of scientists has been researching the issue of Hannibal's root, and they believe that they've found some important evidence in the ground itself. Along one of the proposed routes, the researchers found a layer about 40 centimeters, or 16 inches, below the surface that appears to have been both churned up and compacted, which they say could only be explained by the passage of thousands of animals, such as the thousands of horses and mules that Hannibal's army had. Radiocarbon dating suggests that this layer was deposited in the ballpark of 218 BCE, and genetic and chemical

analysis of the sediment is highly suggestive of the presence of horse dung. But not everyone is persuaded of the definitiveness of this evidence, and the team is hoping to find metal artifacts in the area that might bolster their argument, or maybe evidence of elephants having been in the area. Though even the latter might not be enough to end the debate, as Hannibal's younger brother Hasdrubal also crossed the Alps with elephants 11 years after Hannibal, and of course there's no consensus on whether he followed the exact same route as Hannibal or not. And he hasn't been remembered for 2,000 years. Right, yeah, nobody remembers Hasdrubal. So besides learning a lot more than I had known about this period of history, I found the big takeaway from Omer's email and my research to be an echo of the idea that what we hear is an opinion, not a fact, and what we see is a perspective, not the truth. And I think

that that's a good reminder that not everything that we think we see is a perspective, not the truth. And I think that that's a good reminder that not everything that we think we know is completely accurate, or maybe even fully known by anyone. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have anything that you'd like to add to the discussion, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I am going to give him an odd sounding situation and he has to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Benjamin Busser.

A man is given incorrect medical information about someone. This leads to his arrest. Why? Incorrect medical information about someone. Yes. Okay. Is he related to this person? No.

His arrest for a crime, I guess? Yes. So in giving, he's given information about someone else. Yes. And then takes some action? Yes. Okay. he's given information about someone else yes and then take some action yes okay on that person somehow no take some action that could be anything okay but he's so he believes something incorrectly about this other person yes about their medical makeup or status or something? Yes.

And then commits a crime, would you say? I wouldn't say it like that. But takes some action? Yes. That leads to his arrest? Yes. All right. He's not related to this person.

Do I need to know, is this true? It's based loosely on a true story. Do we need to know the man's identity? No's based loosely on a true story. Do I need to know the man's identity? No. His occupation? No. The time period? No.

The location? No. None of that? None of that. Is the man a criminal? Yes. Okay. Do I need to know the other person, I don't even know what to call them, the other person,

their identity? No. Or any of those things about them? No. Do I need to, I don't need to know their occupation correct okay he's a criminal would you say that he victimized this second person yes because he thought they were vulnerable in some way no you know what i mean like like he could succeed in whatever crime he was planning because of the medical information he was given? No, that's not it at all. Okay. Okay. So he's, he, what did we say, victimized that person?

Yeah. Somehow. Yeah. But not in a way that you'd say constituted crime. No, it did constitute a crime. Would it help me to figure out what that crime was? Possibly, yeah, yeah. Was it a violent crime no a financial no a fraud of any kind no is there anyone else involved besides these besides

these two people um i mean someone not specifically arrests him but yeah yeah. Yeah. Okay. Not a specific other person. When he interacts with the second person, are they in the same location? I mean, is he like directly robbing him or something? He is in the same location with the other person. When something happens? Yes, at some point. I mean, you can do like some financial crimes or something where you don't even have to. Oh, I see.

I'm just trying to get my hands on what kind of crime this is. He has to be physically present with the other person to commit the crime on them. Okay. And do I need to know anything more about how he got this bad information about the person's medical status? He was given it. He was specifically given it. But I don't need to pursue that. I don't need to know who gave it to him or what the circumstances were. Well, actually, yes.

That would help? That would help, yeah. And I'll tell you, the police made sure that he had this incorrect medical information. So it was a setup to, I don't want to say entrap, to catch him in a crime, to sort of induce him to commit this crime. No.

But they suspected that he'd commit a crime? No. That someone would? No. No, your timing is all kind of wrong here is why I keep giving you no's on these. The police gave him some false information about this second person's medical status or something. Yes. And seeing that induced him...

No. Well, I'm sorry. You were going to say I should let you finish, but... To commit whatever wrong... No. That's where the sorry. You were going to say I should let you finish, but... To commit whatever wrong... No. That's where the timeline's wrong. Okay. He committed a crime.

Yes. And at the time he committed the crime, he had this faulty information about... No. He committed the crime before he got the information. Yes. And you already uncovered that it's to help entrap him into an arresting that he was given the faulty information. So he committed a crime and then was given bad information and then did

something further. That was, yes, yes. That permitted the police to arrest him. Yes. Yes. Did he believe the information he was given reflected something about his own

medical status? No. Like he thought he'd gotten it. Oh, that's a good thought yeah that's not it that's a really good thought yeah but no that's not it i could see how that would work though so he committed some crime involving another person and it was told yes and i'll give you a little help here he kidnapped a child and was told something false about that child's medical condition. So you could easily see he would give himself in or go to a hospital

or something if he thought that he'd gotten an illness or something from the child. Right, that's not it. That's not it, though. But they were hoping he would do something with this incorrect information. Blackmail? Was he using it? No. No. No, they were going to use it to entrap him.

Okay, but not for him to identify himself as the kidnapper. No, it would be for that. Oh, really? Okay. It was going to help identify him as the kidnapper if he acted on this medical information. But they already knew he was the kidnapper, it sounds like. No, no. They released the information in general.

Oh, just broadcast it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so a child was kidnapped and the policepper, it sounds like. No, no. They released the information in general. Oh, just broadcast it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so a child was kidnapped and the police just released this false information. Right. And that led the kidnapper to somehow betray his identity. Yes, yes. Yes. Okay.

That's most of it. I really keep wanting to say that he thought he was in some danger. Right, no. And maybe you've got enough of it that I should explain it, was that they gave him some information that the child was going to need some very specific products in the hopes that he would go to a pharmacist to buy very specific items. And in Benjamin's puzzle, that's what he does and he's arrested. But Benjamin says, this is a partially true story that unfortunately has a tragic ending. In 1956, an infant child was

kidnapped out of his own backyard by a man in financial trouble. In 1956, an infant child was kidnapped out of his own backyard by a man in financial trouble. In the hope of capturing the kidnapper, the police released a statement asking for the child's return and stating that he had a very specific health condition that required a very special baby formula that included sterile water, sugar, and evaporated milk. They also included that the baby was in need of vitamin B12 and something called Dozex. They stated explicitly that the mixture required a pharmacist hoping the kidnapper would attempt to buy the required items at a pharmacy and the pharmacist would recognize the specific items and contact police. One man did attempt to buy B12 and Dozex from a nearby pharmacy but left before the police

could be contacted. Unfortunately, the kidnapper was not caught in time to save the child, but the man was eventually caught through other means. This story, unfortunately, has a much more somber ending than my puzzle, but I couldn't help but wonder if a scheme like this might actually work in catching someone. The story itself is from a great podcast called Case File, and the episode is titled Peter Weinberger. So none of that was true. They just, the child didn't actually need any of that. Right, exactly. But they were trying to make the kidnapper show himself, and that way they would be able to know it was the kidnapper.

That's clever, because he doesn't want to be guilty of manslaughter or whatever that would be. Right, exactly. So thanks so much to Benjamin for his puzzle and for trying to make it a little more upbeat than the original story. If anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast is supported primarily by our incredible listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in

the supporters section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll get outtakes, extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on Sasha, the official Futility Closet podcast. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link. At our website, you'll also find over 10,000 bite-sized distractions, the Futility Closet store, information, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Our music was written and performed by my awesome brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.