How urine was used 4,000 years ago to detect pregnancy

Today, finding out if you’re pregnant is often simple: You pee on the stick that comes with the drugstore test and wait for the lines to appear.

Tests for women to use at home were first marketed in the 1960s. They work by detecting the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in the urine, which is produced primarily by cells in the placenta during pregnancy.

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

Of course, a positive pregnancy test doesn’t necessarily lead to a baby — one in five cases will end in miscarriage. However, that positive test is often seen as the beginning of a journey towards motherhood.

But things were very different in the past. The obvious signs of missed periods or cravings for food could mean pregnancy. But until the pregnancy was much further along there was no way of knowing that the symptoms were not caused by illness or menopause.

In ancient Greece, it was believed that women would know if they were pregnant because they felt the uterus close after sex — which, of course, is impossible. Especially because at such an early stage neither fertilization nor implantation has yet occurred.

But that hasn’t stopped people from trying to find out for sure. The 4th century BC Hippocratic medical text Aphorisms suggested that a woman take a sip of mead at bedtime. It was a mixture of wine, water and honey that would have caused pain if the woman had conceived.

Kim Phillips, professor of history at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) has studied the Secrets of Women (A Woman’s Secrets), a 13th-century medical text that told readers that if a girl’s breasts pointed downwards, it meant she was pregnant. This was thought to be because “at the moment of fertilization, menstrual blood” would rise “to the breasts”.

the role of urine

Today, urine is the key to getting an accurate answer. But while it may seem like a modern method, it’s not. In fact, three ancient Egyptian papyri show that urine was already used 4,500 years ago.

These papyri depict a woman who wants to know if she will conceive, or a woman who may be pregnant, urinating on wheat and barley seeds over the course of several days. If the barley sprouts first, it’s a boy, but if the wheat grows, it’s a girl. If none of the seeds sprout, she is not pregnant.

Many variations of tests using urine have been found throughout history. In fact, in several medical prescriptions from the medieval period onwards, it was said that a needle placed in a woman’s urine would turn red or black if she was pregnant. In the 16th century, the word “needle” was misinterpreted as “nettle”, leading to the idea that a woman should leave a nettle in some of her urine overnight and if it had red spots in the morning then she was pregnant. .

These tests could be done under a doctor’s supervision or on your own. Since it was founded in 1518, the Royal College of Physicians in London has banned female healers from practicing medicine. This included uroscopy (medical tests of the urine), but some women did it anyway.

In the early 17th century, a woman known as Mistress Phillips—possibly a midwife—was taken to court for using uroscopy to diagnose pregnancy.

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

modern methods

The focus on urine in many of these ancient tests is an antecedent of what we know today. And variations of these urine-based tests were repeated in medical writings well into the 17th century. If a woman’s urine was kept in a sealed container for a few days, “certain living things” would be seen in the jar, according to the book. Complete Midwives Practice (Complete Practice of Midwives), in 1656. Another option was to boil the urine—white stripes would mean the woman was pregnant.

It was in the 1930s that the first indications emerged that seed tests, described in ancient Egypt as magical, should not be discarded. Research testing the hypothesis found that 70% of the time, pregnant women’s urine actually made the seeds grow — although there was no correlation with the sex of the child. Using the urine of men or women who weren’t pregnant didn’t have the same effect. Clearly, there really was a unique substance in the urine of pregnant women.

That 20th-century research proved that all those historic tests — whether they involved seeds or needles — pointed to something much more reliable than special drinks, washing clothes in rose water or checking breasts.

Another way of using urine was introduced in the 1920s and 1930s. First, female mice and rabbits were injected with the urine of a pregnant woman and killed to see if their ovaries had changed. Later, live frogs (the preferred species was the African clawed frog) were used and injected with women’s urine. If the woman was pregnant, the frogs would release eggs.

Research into this continued into the 1950s. But all these methods were expensive and not 100% reliable. Also, they were cruel to mice and frogs. And in the 1960s, new antibody studies led to the pregnancy test we know today.

Pregnancy has always played a key role in women’s history. Being able to get pregnant was essential for 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 their results.

Helen King is professor emeritus of classical studies at the Open University.

*This article was published on the science news website The Conversation and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original English version.