uromancy and mice: a history of the pregnancy test
up until the 1960s, pregnancy tests were a laboured process.
5 minute read
we've come along baby.
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for those in possession of a uterus, there comes a time when one or all of the following happen: your period is late, you’re spotting, feeling nauseous, maybe throwing up, you’re going to the bathroom a lot, your breasts feel oddly tender, or you’re suddenly super disgusted by the sight of, let’s say, avocados. and one of your next thoughts is, perhaps after either panic or delight, “hmm, maybe i should take a pregnancy test…”
while a rare few are happy to simply go by the aforementioned symptoms, most others like more confirmation, which can come from either a blood test or urine test. the latter being the most convenient and easy, oh and private — just a trip to your local pharmacy, and you are one step closer to
at-home tests are pretty simple. you take a cute little stick, urinate on it or dip it in your urine (this part of the process is entirely up to you and your creative self), wait a few minutes for the identifying symbols — sometimes lines — or for the words: “pregnant” or “not pregnant.”
when in contact with said urine, the test detects the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hcg), which is only found in your body when you are pregnant. it changes the colour of a chemical inside the stick, which then indicates your state of baby-making. most can know if they’re pregnant or not as early as 10 days after conceiving.
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it’s all an incredibly advanced, affordable and easy way to discover some very big news. of course, pregnancy tests have come a long way — women have peed on more than plastic sticks to determine whether or not they were with-child.
take ancient greeks and egyptians. they had women who suspected they might be pregnant urinate onto bags full of wheat and barely, and if they sprouted seeds, said lady was deemed pregnant. this was even considered a foolproof way to determine gender.
here, for example, here’s a bit from the berlin papyrus (historical medical documents) translated into english: “another test for a woman who will bear or a woman who will not bear. wheat and spelt: let the woman water them daily with her urine like dates and like sh’at seeds in two bags. if they both grow, she will bear: if the wheat grows, it will be a boy; if the spelt grows, it will be a girl. if neither grows, she will not bear.”
while that might sound utterly ridiculous, according to some modern studies — gender speculation aside — this process actually did manage to correctly identify 70 to 85 per cent of pregnancies.
uroscopy was also a popular method, during the middle ages, which was a very non-scientific way to visually examine urine for anything unusual that could hint at pregnancy. this led to the phenomenon known as “piss prophets,” who would use “uromancy” — divination using urine, natch — to predict the future, through such elements as the colour and taste (!) of urine. they’d even examine the bubbles that would arise the moment the urine hit the divination bowl. (if the bubbles were large and distanced, the urinator was going to be rich, and if they were small and packed together, the urinator was doomed to be poor, ill or lose a loved one.) women would often visit piss prophets to find out if they were pregnant and what sex their child might be. if they were pregnant, the prophets believed their urine could rust a nail or change the colour of a leaf. having a baby is kind of magical, i guess?
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it was german gynecologists selmar aschheim and bernhard zondek who, mercifully in 1928, developed the seed that would eventually lead to pregnancy tests as we know them today, pun absolutely intended. the pair found that pregnancy could be determined by the presence of hcg through a very on-brand unusual test: injecting young female mice with a pregnant woman’s urine. afterwards, they’d kill and dissect the mice, and if they were ovulating, it meant the woman’s urine contained hcg and she was, indeed, in the family way. (these “a-z tests,” as they were called, were later conducted on rabbits and frogs, too.)
up until the 1960s, these pregnancy tests remained a laboured process — and an expensive one. urine would be sent to a lab about a month after conception by a doctor, where it would then be injected into five mice per woman. it would take a week to get results. not to mention the fact that most doctors would only send urine to labs if their patients were wealthy, or if they felt their patients absolutely needed to know for medical reasons. needless to say, the mice and rabbit tests were a rarity, and giving your breast a quick squeeze for tenderness was the more common way to know if you had a bun baking in the oven.
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in 1960, doctors carl axel gemzell and leif wide developed an immunologic pregnancy test based on in-vitro hemagglutination inhibition. according to the national institutes of health, “it used purified hcg, mixed with a urine sample and antibodies directed against hcg.” in a negative pregnancy test, the red cells clumped, and in a positive one, they appeared distanced. the tricky part of these tests was that there could be substances in the urine that would often lead to false-negatives or false-positives.
but it was using this antibody technology that the first at-home pregnancy tests arrived soon after, in 1971 in canada, and in 1977 in the u.s. around the time of the sexual revolution and a push to detect pregnancy earlier and invest more into reproductive research.
these tests looked a lot like a science experiment, the most popular being wampole’s two-hour test, which could be done as early as four days after a missed period. the rather chilling packaging featured a man performing the test while wearing a lab coat. the box included test tubes, “control solution,” hcg “antiserum,” and a bottle of “cell suspension.” it was a 10-step process and was more accurate when it came to positive results (97 per cent) than negative results (80 per cent)
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far more user-friendly at-home stick tests finally arrived as recently as 1988, and are far more accurate (first response, for example, can detect results with 99 per cent accuracy), and still work by detecting hormones in a woman’s urine. just like the advent of birth control and vibrators, they granted women more control over their bodies and privacy over their choices, though their history certainly sheds a light on just how long it took to invest in research regarding women’s health. but that’s really no surprise, is it?
sadaf ahsan is a toronto-based culture writer, editor and stereotypical middle child. she can be reached here.
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