9 Historical Methods of Detecting Pregnancy

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Home pregnancy tests are magical and work by detecting trace levels of the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in the urine; hCG is present after egg implantation, which occurs six to 12 days after fertilization, and is secreted by the cells that are beginning to form the placenta.

Home pregnancy tests became widely available in 1978, although they took two hours to develop and gave false negatives 80 percent of the time. Today they can tell as early as five days before your missed period.

Before the invention of this miraculous device, the most reliable test was to wait and see. While it might be a nice surprise to find out you’re pregnant the old-fashioned way—barfing, missing periods, having a baby—women still wanted to know as early as possible,

So how did they do it? It always comes back to pee ...

1. The Wheat and Barley Test

Possibly the earliest home pregnancy tests came from Ancient Egypt. In 1350 BCE, women were advised to urinate on wheat and barley seeds over the course of several days; if the wheat sprouted, she was having a girl, and if the barley sprouted, a boy. If neither sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant. The most interesting thing about this test was that it actually worked: In 1963, a laboratory experimented with the wheat and barley test and found that, 70 percent of the time, the urine of pregnant women would cause the seeds to sprout, while the urine of non-pregnant women and men did not. The Ancient Egyptians knew everything.

2. The Onion Test

While the Ancient Egyptians were on to something with the wheat and barley test, they and the Ancient Greeks shared a fuzzy understanding of anatomy. Both Egyptian medical papyri and Hippocrates, lauded as the father of medicine, suggested that a woman who suspected she might be pregnant insert an onion or other strong-smelling bulbous vegetable into her vagina overnight. If her breath smelled of onions the next morning, she wasn’t pregnant; this was based on the idea that her womb was open, and wafting the oniony scent up to her mouth like a wind tunnel. If she were pregnant, then the womb would be closed, so no wind tunnel.
The onion test might explain why one young man left an onion in his sleeping lady friend’s vagina after a drunken tryst as, the medical report explains, “a parting gesture of affection.” She only discovered it after she tore off to the hospital thinking she had vaginal cancer.

3. The Beer and Date Mash Test

Another Ancient Egyptian papyrus suggested spreading mashed up dates and beer around on the floor and recording how many times the unfortunate woman who sat on this carpet of nasty vomited. If it were a lot, then presumably she was very  pregnant. The thinking behind this, though impractical and weird, is not ridiculous, aversion to strong odors and propensity to vomit are often signs of early pregnancy. Or it could be a sign that covering a floor with mashed up beer and dates is gross.

4. The Latch Test

From The Distaff Gospels, a collection of women’s medical lore written in the late 15th century: “My friends, if you want to know if a woman is pregnant, you must ask her to pee in a basin and then put a latch or a key in it, but it is better to use a latch—leave this latch in the basin with the urine for three or four hours. Then throw the urine away and remove the latch. If you see the impression of the latch on the basin, be sure that the woman is pregnant. If not, she is not pregnant.”

5. Piss Prophets

As bizarre as the “latch test” sounds, it still recognized that something in pregnant pee was different than non-pregnant lady or man pee, a fact that 16th century European “piss prophets” also recognized. These so-called experts claimed that they could determine whether or not a woman was with child by the color and characteristics of her urine. Some also mixed urine with wine and observed the results, a test that might have seen some success, given that alcohol can react to proteins present in pregnant pee. Of course, these piss prophets didn’t limit their wee divination to pregnant ladies; they could also, by examining urine, intuit whether the urine’s owner was suffering from any illness or disease.

6. Look Into My Eyes

One 16th century physician, Jacques Guillemeau, claimed you could tell by a woman’s eyes whether she was pregnant. Guillemeau, author of an influential treatise on ophthalmology, claimed that as early as the second month, “a pregnant woman gets deep-set eyes with small pupils, drooping lids and swollen little veins in the corner of the eye.” That is likely not true, but he was right about one thing: Eyes can change during pregnancy, affecting your vision and why it is unwise to get new contacts or prescription glasses during pregnancy.

7. I Saw the Sign

Early in pregnancy, six to eight weeks in, the cervix, labia and vagina can take on a dark bluish or purple-red hue, owing to the increased blood flow to the area. This remarkable indication of pregnancy, before other traditional signs like craving pickles and barfing, was first noticed in 1836 by a French physician. It later became known as Chadwick’s sign, after James Read Chadwick, an obstetrics doctor who brought the discovery up at a meeting of the American Gynecological Society in 1886. Given that you had to look at the vagina to see the sign, and how prudish 19th century doctors tended to be, it is unlikely that Chadwick’s sign was used very often as an indicator of pregnancy.

8. The Rabbit Test

Other than observational tests such as Chadwick’s sign, pregnancy tests were still unpleasant until the 20th century. Investigation into hormones, the big thing in science at the turn of the century, made pregnancy testing unpleasant for rabbits, mice, and rats.

In the 1920s, two German scientists, Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek, determined that there was a specific hormone present in the urine of pregnant women that seemed to be linked to ovary growth; we now know it as human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. They figured this out by injecting the urine of pregnant women into sexually immature rabbits, rats, and mice, which would induce ovarian development. Most of the time, the pregnant pee  produced bulging masses on the animals’ ovaries, a sure indication of the presence of hCG. The Rabbit Test was born. According to a contemporary medical journal: A sample of urine was injected into a group of young female mice over a period of five days. On the fifth day, the mice were killed and autopsied to examine the state of their ovaries. If their reproductive bits looked excited, the test was positive. If you wanted your results in less than five days, they could simply use more mice.

This method ran through lots of rabbits, mice, and rats; though the phrase “the rabbit died” popularly meant that the woman was pregnant, in actuality, all of the rabbits—and the mice and rats—died. Though doctors could look at the ovaries of the animal without killing it, that tended to be too much trouble.

9. The Frog Test

Though it worked on the same principle as the Rabbit Test, this one was actually a bit better—at least the animal remained alive at the end of it. In the late 1940s, scientists determined that when pregnant lady pee is injected into a live toad or frog, the unfortunate amphibian will produce eggs within 24 hours. The toad or frog lived to see another day and, usually, another test. The test was also called the “Bufo” test, after the particular species of toad usually used.
As horrible as the animal-killing tests sound, they were important steps on the road to first the blood test and then the home pregnancy test, which fundamentally changed the way women think about pregnancy and their own bodies. So let’s all say a quiet thank you to the rabbits, rats, mice, frogs, and onions who were sacrificed for the cause.