Of uromancy and mice
UP UNTIL THE 1960s, PREGNANCY TESTS WERE LABOURED AND UNRELIABLE PROCESS
For those with 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 such symptoms, most others like more confirmation, which can come from either a blood test or a urine test. The urine test is the most convenient, easy and private — just a trip to your local pharmacy and you are one step closer to an answer.
At-home tests are pretty simple. You take a little stick, urinate on it or dip it in your urine, then wait a few minutes for the identifying symbols — sometimes lines — or for the words: “pregnant” or “not pregnant.”
When in contact with urine, the test detects the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), which is found in your body only when you are pregnant. It changes the colour of a chemical inside the stick, which then indicates your condition.
Most can know if they’re pregnant or not as early as 10 days after conceiving.
It’s all an incredibly advanced, affordable and easy way to discover some very big news. Pregnancy tests have come a long way — women have peed on more than sticks to determine whether or not they were with child.
Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had a woman urinate onto bags full of grain, and if they sprouted seeds, she was deemed pregnant. This was even considered a foolproof way to determine gender.
Here, for example, is a bit from the Berlin Papyrus (a historical medical document) translated into English: “Another test for a woman who will bear or a woman who will not bear. Wheat and spelled: 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 spelled 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 “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 from 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.) Piss prophets believed a pregnant woman’s urine could rust a nail or change the colour of a leaf.
It was German gynecologists Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek who, in 1928, developed what would eventually lead to pregnancy tests as we know them today. They found they could determine pregnancy by the presence of HCG by injecting young female mice with a woman’s urine. Afterward, they’d kill and dissect the mice, and if they were ovulating, it meant the woman’s urine contained HCG and she was, indeed, pregnant. (These “A-Z tests,” as they were called, were later conducted on rabbits and frogs, too.)
Up until the 1960s, these pregnancy tests difficult and expensive. Urine would be sent to a lab about a month after conception, 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 send urine to labs only 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 test.
In 1960, doctors Carl Axel Gemzell and Leif Wide developed an immunologic pregnancy test. The National Institutes of Health said “it used purified HCG, mixed with a urine sample and antibodies directed against HCG.” But they were prone 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.
The most popular was Walpole’s two-hour test, which could be done as early as four days after a missed period. 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)
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.