How long was the rabbit test used

"Dead rabbit" redirects here. For the 19th-century New York gang, see Dead Rabbits. For the American band, see The Dead Rabbitts.

The rabbit test, or Friedman test, was an early pregnancy test developed in 1931 by Maurice Friedman and Maxwell Edward Lapham[1] at the University of Pennsylvania.

Test[edit]

The hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is produced during pregnancy and can be found in a pregnant woman's urine and blood; it indicates the presence of an implanted fertilized egg. An earlier test, known as the AZ test, was developed by Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek.[2] When urine from a woman in the early months of pregnancy was injected into immature female mice, their ovaries would enlarge and show follicular maturation. The test was considered reliable, with an error rate of less than 2%.[3] Friedman and Lapham's test was essentially identical, but replaced the mouse with a rabbit. A few days after the injection, the animal would be dissected and the size of her ovaries examined.

The rabbit test became a widely used bioassay (animal-based test) to test for pregnancy. The term "rabbit test" was first recorded in 1949, and was the origin of a common euphemism, "the rabbit died", for a positive pregnancy test.[4] The phrase was, in fact, based on a common misconception about the test. While many people assumed that the injected rabbit would die only if the woman was pregnant, in fact all rabbits used for the test died, as they had to be dissected in order to examine the ovaries.[5]

A later alternative to the rabbit test, known as the "Hogben test", used the African clawed frog, and yielded results without the need to cut the animal open.[6] Modern pregnancy tests continue to operate on the basis of testing for the presence of the hormone hCG in the blood or urine, but no longer require the use of a live animal.

References[edit]

1. ^ "The assay of gonadotropic extracts in the post-partum rabbit". Journal of Endocrinology. 24 (5). 1 May 1939.
2. ^ Morris Fishbein, M.D., ed. (1976). "Aschheim-Zondek Test". The New Illustrated Medical and Health Encyclopedia. Vol. 1 (Home Library ed.). New York, N.Y. 10016: H. S. Stuttman Co. p. 139.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
3. ^ Evans, Herbert M.; Simpson, Miriam E. (1930). "Aschheim-Zondek test for pregnancy – its present status". Calif West Med. 32 (3): 145–8. PMC 1657362. PMID 18741327.
4. ^ Wilton, Dave (28 February 2007). "rabbit test / the rabbit died". www.wordorigins.org. Archived from the original on 2 November 2019. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
5. ^ Howe, Marvine (10 March 1991). "Dr Maurice Friedman 87 Dies Created Rabbit Pregnancy Test". The New York Times.
6. ^ Yong, Ed (4 May 2017). "How a Frog Became the First Mainstream Pregnancy Test". The Atlantic. Retrieved 30 July 2018.

Sources[edit]

• Friedman, Maurice H.; Lapham, Maxwell E. (March 1931). "A Simple, Rapid Procedure for the Laboratory Diagnosis of Early Pregnancies". American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 21 (3): 405–410. doi:10.1016/S0002-9378(16)42174-5. ISSN 0002-9378. Wikidata Q115596844.

External links[edit]

• Aschheim-Zondek pregnancy reaction at Who Named It?
• The Rabbit Test at Snopes
• About dot Com Explanation at German Inventions and Discoveries
• The demand for pregnancy testing: The Aschheim–Zondek reaction, diagnostic versatility, and laboratory services in 1930s Britain, pages 240–241

Trying to figure out if you’re pregnant is probably as old as humanity itself. People had some pretty weird methods, like urinating on wheat and barley seeds (which kind of worked!), or mixing urine with wine for divination by a “wine prophet,” or shoving an onion into a patient’s vagina to see if it gave her bad breath. (This does NOT work, Gwyneth Paltrow. Do not recommend this.)

These days, people who think they might be pregnant can pee on testing sticks that check for the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG). But nearly a century ago, when reliable HCG testing was being developed, it looked about as bizarre as the “wine prophet” and was so expensive only wealthy people could afford it.

Over-the-counter pregnancy tests cost less now but still stretch some people’s budgets— especially if they want to take them regularly. With Texas’s abortion law essentially banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, early detection is more important than ever.

Hormones were a relatively new concept to Western scientists in the 1920s, when gynecologists Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek were conducting researchat a Berlin teaching hospital. According to a 1930 medical journal archived by the National Institutes of Health, the test they developed involved this: The urine of a possibly pregnant person was bottled and sent to a lab, where it was repeatedly injected subcutaneously into five female mice over five days. They were then killed and autopsied. If the mice had enlarged ovaries or signs of recently ovulating, then the test subject was pregnant, Aschheim and Zondek claimed.

Not long after they developedthe “AZ test,” their research ended abruptly when the men, both Jewish, were forced to flee Nazi Germany. By then, American doctor Maurice Friedman had adapted the test in the United States using a rabbit. He later bragged, “The only more reliable test is to wait nine months.”

A test so involved was available only to the well-off, but soon tens of thousands of rabbits were being sacrificed in the name of science, and it quickly became a part of popular culture. Although rabbits were used for all manner of research, the “rabbit test” became synonymous with pregnancy screenings, and the phrase “the rabbit died” entered common usage asa euphemistic way of saying someone was pregnant (even though the rabbit always died during the test).

The phrase appears in a noir thriller based on the 1947 unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short (“She forced herself to look squarely at him. ‘The rabbit died.’ ”), according to a compendium of historical slang, and in a 1967 gossip column to announce comedian Joan Rivers’s pregnancy.

In her 1980 memoir about having 10 kids, humor writer Teresa Bloomingdale opened like this:

“I should have seen it coming when the rabbit died.

‘What do you mean the rabbit died?’ I asked my obstetrician in 1956. ‘Doesn’t the rabbit always die in a pregnancy test?’

‘Not this one,’ he replied. ‘I had just completed the injection when the dumb bunny jumped off the table and killed herself.’

[...] That bunny wasn’t so dumb, she was just cowardly. She foresaw my future and couldn’t bear to be involved.”

In a 1978 episode of the hit TV series “M*A*S*H,” a female character worries she’s pregnant and threatens to kill another character’s pet rabbit to find out.

Also in 1978, Billy Crystal made his big-screen debut in a movie co-written and directed by Rivers called “The Rabbit Test,” in which he portrayed “the world’s first pregnant man.” (You can find the truly ridiculous rabbit death scene on YouTube here; be forewarned the full clip contains a racial slur.)

Dead rabbits may have spread across the fruited plain, but in the United Kingdom, a slightly more humane version was developed that involved injecting a frog with a patient’s urine. If the sample contained the pregnancy hormone, the frog would lay eggs within 24 hours, providing the key information without the need to kill the animal first. Plus, the frogs could be reused.

By the 1970s, the rabbits lived. That’s when the first over-the-counter pregnancy tests became widely available. And though they no longer involved an animal, they functioned in essentially the same way, testing for HCG.

Read more Retropolis:

When did the rabbit test start?

Are rabbits still used for pregnancy tests?

How did they test for pregnancy in the 1970s?

How did they detect pregnancy in the old days?