What does the phrase ';The Rabbit Died'; have to do with a pregnacy test?

I have alwasy wondered where the term ';the rabbit died'; was coined with regards to a positive pregnancy test!What does the phrase ';The Rabbit Died'; have to do with a pregnacy test?
it is believed that early pregnancy test the woman's urine was injected into the rabbit and if the rabbit died she was pregnant.








http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/rabbit.ht鈥?/a>What does the phrase ';The Rabbit Died'; have to do with a pregnacy test?
Thats a good question, but i have never heard it before!
never heard of it before
I think they use to test pregnancy that way. The only way to complete the test was to kill the rabbit to see if the was a change in the rabbits ovaries.
The phrase, ';The rabbit died,'; came to be a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test in the late 1920 and early 1930s. Around 1927 it was discovered that if you injected the urine of a pregnant woman into a rabbit, there would be corpora hemorrhagica in the ovaries of the rabbit. These bulging masses on the ovaries could not be seen with out killing the rabbit to inspect the ovaries, so invariably, every rabbit died, even if the woman wasn't pregnant. The other posters left out the part about the rabbit having to be killed to determine pregnancy.
The origins of the ';rabbit test'; lie with the discovery in the 1920s that a woman starts producing a hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) shortly after a fertilized egg implants itself in the uterine wall. (It was later discovered that the presence of hCG causes the placenta to produce progesterone after implantation, necessary to prevent rejection of the developing embryo.) In 1927, medical researchers found that not only is hCG present in the urine of pregnant women, but that female rabbits injected with urine containing hCG would, within a few days, display distinct ovarian changes. Thus the ';rabbit test'; was born, and with it the misconception that the rabbit's death was an indicator of a positive result.
I never heard this with my first pregnancy, but with my second, I've read that years ago, they would inject urine into a rabbit and if it lived, the woman wasn't pregnant and if the rabbit died- she was! That sounds pretty farfetched to me, but this is where that saying came from.
Hmmmm, I have heard it before (in old shows) but not recently. I think it has to do with the rabbit being a woman's period, and ';dying'; means ';Not going to have one for nine months';





I;m just guessing here.
Check out this website:


http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/pregnancyt鈥?/a>





HcG is produced during pregnancy and excreted in the urine. This urine was then injected into a rabbit. If HcG was present it caused corpora hemorrhagica (bulging mass) in the ovaries of the rabbit which could not be seen with out killing it to inspect the ovaries. So, the rabbit died means that she had a pregnancy test done and would be telling the truth about her pregnancy. Even though the rabbit was killed regardless of her results. Hope that helps.





And anyone who is interested M.A.S.H had an interesting episode about this.