M. Friedman; Developed ‘Rabbit Test’

Maurice Harold Friedman, the reproduction researcher and internist who developed the “rabbit test” to determine pregnancy, died Friday at his home here of cancer.

Friedman was 87 and had been under the care of the Hospice of Southwest Florida.

Friedman was a researcher and teacher of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1930s when he developed a pregnancy test named for him.

Urine from a woman who believes she may be pregnant was injected into a female rabbit. If the subject was pregnant, the rabbit developed growths in its ovaries after two days.

The widely held belief that the rabbit would die because of a positive test was never true. Rather, the rabbit was killed before it was opened to determine if the ovary mass had formed.

The test was replaced by kits that determine the presence of the same hormones in pregnant women without using animals.

In 1936, Friedman worked at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Washington as a researcher in reproductive physiology and during World War II became a medical officer with the Army Air Corps.

After the war, he returned to Washington and practiced internal medicine, and also joined the Georgetown University Hospital staff and became an associate professor of medicine at its medical school.

He retired from private practice in 1959 to become a financial adviser to the Planned Parenthood Assn., Children’s House and Social Hygiene Society.

He lived in Maryland, Switzerland and California before moving to Florida about 10 years ago.