conception

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Conception or conception (from Latin conceptio ) refers to the fusion of the egg cell with a sperm during fertilization before a germ is formed . By their nature, conception can only be determined retrospectively at the beginning of a pregnancy .

etymology

The original prefix was ent- , which denotes both the direction towards something and the separation from something away. In front of the letter f, the unstressed prefix ent- resulted in the prefix emp-, so that the verb is now received , which comes from the ahd. Intfāhan .

Synonymous with conception is conception , from Latin conceptio , derived from concipere ( con-capere , capere ), in German to catch, take, grasp, receive. It is the root word from which the term contraceptives for the various contraceptives is derived.

history

In popular belief there was the assumption that neither a man nor sexual intercourse had a plausible connection with the occurrence of a pregnancy. Rather, pregnancy has been attributed to the effects of water, the light of the sun or moon, or even food.

Democritus , Alkmaion , Parmenides , Empedocles and Hippocratic physicians assumed that both sexual partners contribute equal "seeds" to conception, while Aristotle contributes the woman's conception in the menstrual blood (as the substance for the formation of germs) and that of the man in the semen (as the carrier represented by form and movement on the female fabric).

A medically exact meaning of the term conception was only found through the research of the embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), who discovered the female egg cell in 1827. Previously, the erroneous assumption prevailed that the man's sperm discovered under the microscope were a kind of “semen” that contained only the embryo that the woman received as “fertile soil” during coitus , without her genetic make-up for the development of the child contribute ( preformation theory ). This gave rise to the misnomer "sperm cells" for the sperm, which is no longer in use today because of its misleading meaning. A plant seed already contains a plant embryo and can in no way serve to fertilize a plant egg cell (see also pollination ).

The English physiologist Martin Barry, a student of Friedrich Tiedemann , discovered the penetration of the sperm into the egg cell in 1842 .

As a result of advances in reproductive medicine , conception is also possible through artificial insemination .

See also

swell

  1. ↑ a b Pschyrembel: Dictionary Sexuality. De Gruyter. Berlin / New York 2003, Lemma conception.
  2. ^ Friedrich Kluge: Etymological dictionary of the German language. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1975, Lemma -ent.
  3. ^ Pschyrembel: Dictionary Sexuality. De Gruyter. Berlin / New York 2003, Lemma procreation myths.
  4. ↑ Jutta Kollesch , Diethard Nickel : Ancient healing art. Selected texts from the medical writings of the Greeks and Romans. Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1979 (= Reclams Universal Library. Volume 771); 6th edition ibid 1989, ISBN 3-379-00411-1 , p. 24 f.
  5. ↑ See also Ursula Weisser : Conception, inheritance and prenatal development in medicine in the Arab-Islamic Middle Ages. Erlangen 1983.
  6. ↑ Reinhard Hildebrand: Barry, Martin. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 147.

Historical literature

  • Jacob Rueff : A nice and funny consolation book about the kisses and births of people [...]. Zurich (Christoph Froschauer) 1554; Reprint, with an introduction by Huldrych M. Koelbing, Zurich 1981.
    • Latin edition: De conceptu et generatione hominis. De matrice et eius partibus […]. Frankfurt am Main 1587; Reprint Stuttgart no year