how-urine-has-been-used-for-over-4,000-years-to-detect-pregnancyHow urine has been used for over 4,000 years to detect pregnancy

Today, knowing if you are pregnant is generally very easy: you pee on a stick and wait for the streaks to appear.

Home pregnancy tests were first marketed in the 1960s.

They work by detecting the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone in the urine, which is produced mainly by cells in the placenta during pregnancy.

Blood tests can give you the answer in just 11 days after conception and urine tests a few days later.

Of course, a positive pregnancy test does not necessarily mean a baby: one in five pregnancies ends in a miscarriage.

Even so, the positive test is often seen as the beginning of a journey towards motherhood and fatherhood.

But things were very different in the past. Obvious signs such as a missed period or food cravings could mean pregnancy.

However, until much later in the pregnancy, there was no way to know if these signs were not due to disease or menopause.

looking for a method

Since ancient Greece, it was believed that women would know if they are pregnant because they would feel the uterus closer after sexual intercourse, which, of course, is impossible.

Pregnant woman
Cravings used to be taken as a sign of a possible pregnancy. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES)

Especially since at such an early stage neither fertilization nor implantation has occurred yet.

But this did not stop people from trying to find out with more certainty.

The Hippocratic medical text of the 4th century BC. C. “Aphorisms” suggested taking mead before going to bed. If the woman had conceived, this mixture of wine, water and honey would cause pain and rumbling in her stomach.

Kim Phillips, a history professor at the University of Auckland, studied “Secrets of Women,” a 13th-century medical text that told its readers that if a girl’s breasts pointed downward, it meant she was pregnant.

It was believed that this was so because “at the time of fertilization, the blood of the period rises to the breasts.”

The role of urine

Today, urine is the key to getting a firm answer.

And although it may seem like a modern method, that is not the case. In fact, 3 Egyptian papyri show that urine was used for 4,500 years.

These papyri described a woman who wanted to know if she could conceive or a woman who might be pregnant, urinating on wheat and barley (or spelt) seeds for several days.

Urine analysis
The ancient Egyptians already did tests with urine. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES)

If the barley sprouted first, it was a boy, but if the wheat grew, it was a girl. If none of the seeds grew, then she was not pregnant.

Many varieties of tests using urine have been found throughout history.

In fact, in a number of medical prescriptions from the medieval period onwards, a needle was placed in a woman’s urine which turned it red or black if she was pregnant.

In the 16th century, the word needle was misinterpreted, which in English is said needle and got confused with nettle (nettle), and this led to the belief that the woman had to leave a nettle in her urine overnight to see if there were any red spots in the morning, as that was an indication that she was pregnant.

These tests could be done under or without a doctor’s supervision. Since its founding in 1518, the Royal College of Physicians in London has prohibited female healers from practicing medicine.

This included uroscopies (the medical examination of urine), but some women continued to do so.

In the early 17th century, a woman known as “Mrs. Phillips” – possibly a midwife – was taken to court for using uroscopy to detect pregnancy.

Catherine Chaire, a woman who illegally practiced medicine in London in the 1590s, had her own method: She said she could “diagnose pregnancy by washing clothes with soap and red rose water.”

modern methods

The focus on urine in many tests is an advance of what we know today.

Wheat seeds
The ancient Egyptians made women urinate on wheat and barley seeds to find out if they were pregnant. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES)

And variations of urine-based tests recur in medical writings up to the 17th century.

If a woman’s urine is kept in a sealed container for a few days, “certain living things” can be seen inside, according to the 1656 book “Complete Practice for Midwives.”

Another option was to boil the urine (if white lines appeared, the woman was pregnant).

It was in the 1930s that the first suggestions appeared that the seed tests, described in ancient Egypt as magical, should not be discounted.

Research testing the theory found that 70% of the time, the urine of pregnant women did in fact grow the seeds, although there was no correlation with the sex of the baby.

When the urine of men or women who were not pregnant was used, it had no effect.

Clearly, there was a unique substance in the urine of those of the pregnant women.

Investigations of the 20th century showed that all these historical tests – whether with seeds or needles – had turned up something much more reliable than special concoctions, washing clothes in rose water, or checking the breasts.

Mice, rabbits and frogs

Still, another way to use urine emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.

First, mice or rabbits were injected with urine from a pregnant woman, and then they were killed to see if their ovaries had changed.

Rabbit
The rabbits were injected with urine to later investigate the state of their ovaries. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES)

Later, live toads (the preferred species being the African clawed frog) were used to inject women’s urine into them. If she was pregnant, the frog would release eggs.

Research on the subject continued into the 1950s. But all these methods were expensive and not 100% reliable. Also, they weren’t good for mice or toads either.

And in the 1960s, new work on antibodies led to the tests we know today.

Pregnancy has always played a key role in women’s history.

Getting pregnant was essential in matters of inheritance and succession. And the history of pregnancy tests shows that people were looking in the right direction, even before they had the tools to be sure of the results.

*Helen King is Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, UK.

*This article was published on The Conversation and reproduced here under the Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original version (in English).

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