Have you ever heard the expression "the rabbit died" to indicate that a woman was pregnant? Neither do we, but that is perhaps because we are from a different generation than the one I used the rabbit test to determine if there was a pregnancy or not.It is a supercurious story that you would like to know.
ancient test of the rabbit to detect a pregnancy
In an ancient Egyptian papyrus, from 1350 BC, one of the first pregnancy tests of which we have news is registered: the woman had to urinate on wheat seeds and barley for several days; if the wheat germinated, I was going to have a girl; if barley germinated, it would be a child; and if none germinated, I was not pregnant.Since then a lot of water has run under the bridge, but urine has continued to be used to determine whether there is a pregnancy or not.
A little over 3,000 years later, in 1927 Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim developed a pregnancy test that was used by applying female urine in mice, and that would later be perfected by two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Maxwell Edward Lapham and Maurice Harold Friedman, who would give his name to the test, to thereafter used with rabbits.
The Friedman test, or rabbit test, consisted of taking a sample of female urine and injecting it into a rabbit, wait several days and then observe your ovaries; if these thickened the rabbit was reacting to the urine, which in pregnant women contains a hormone, the human chorionic gonadotropin ( hCG ), absent in women who are not pregnant, whose urine would have no effect on the rabbit.

Now we tell you the myth about the rabbit test: it was believed that if the rabbit died after the injection of urine was clear signal that the woman was pregnant; otherwise, the rabbit survives the test, which is why the expression "the rabbit died", to say that a woman was pregnant.
The truth is that all the rabbits died, with or without pregnancy, because they had to be operated surgically to be able to observe the ovaries, and it was less expensive to let them die and replace them than to try to save them.
Modern pregnancy tests, those that you can get in many pharmacies around the world and make you in the bathroom from your home, continue to rely on urine and the presence of the hCG hormone, but you don't have to sacrifice any living being to know if you will be the mother of a beautiful baby.Luckily for rabbits.
And if you want to know more, find out how a pregnancy test works.
Images: TipsTimesAdmin, Kevin Jump, silviadinatale ©
Comments
Post a Comment