Bag of Grain
Latch Test
As we move into the 1400s, pregnancy tests started getting more and more superstitious. One excellent example is the “latch test,” which was written about in "The Distaff Gospels," a collection of then-current folk medicine and wisdom. If a woman believed herself to be pregnant, she was instructed to take a metal latch or key and place it in a basin. Then she had to urinate enough to completely submerge the latch and leave it in there for three hours. If, when removed, the outline of the latch was still visible, she was pregnant. This probably had something to do with altered acidity in pregnant urine, but it’s not too reliable.
Look in the Eyes
As medical science advanced, more and more doctors tried to solidify their theories as to exactly what happens to a woman's body when she is pregnant. One of the weirder attempts to predict pregnancy came from French ophthalmologist Jacques Guillemeau. The physician claimed that the eyes were the window to the body as well as the soul, saying that you could diagnose all kinds of things just by looking at them. According to Guillemeau, a pregnant woman’s eyes look deep-set, her pupils shrink and swollen veins appear in the corner of the eye. Although there are ocular changes during the nine months of pregnancy, they can’t be observed so easily with the naked eye.
"Piss Prophets"
In the 1600s, the examination of urine to determine a woman’s pregnancy was restricted to the experts. A wave of self-proclaimed “piss prophets” built entire medical practices on the back of urine, performing numerous tests to discover if a woman was pregnant. They believed that the urine of a pregnant woman was a clear, pale lemon color with slight clouding toward the surface. It wasn’t just women who used their services, though—the piss prophets would diagnose all kinds of diseases simply from an examination of their patient's urine.
The Urine Ribbon
Another 17th century test that had dubious practical uses but involved a lot of urine, this method was weird and complicated. A woman who thought she was pregnant would go to a doctor and pee into a basin. The physician would soak a ribbon in the urine until it was saturated, then pull it out and let it dry. Once dried, he would place it in front of the woman’s face and light it on fire. If the smell of burning pee-soaked fabric made her nauseous, she was deemed pregnant. Needless to say, there’s no scientific validity to this one at all.
Rabbit Test
One of the more bizarre pregnancy tests of the 20th century was invented by doctors Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim. The two had observed that when the urine of a pregnant woman was injected into small female animals, their ovaries would enlarge. They originally tested this on mice, but when the procedure first started to see extensive public use in the mid-1940s, doctors had begun to use rabbits. Although the test was quite accurate, it had its drawbacks—to examine the rabbit’s ovaries, the rabbit had to be killed.
Frog Test
As an alternative to the rabbit test, scientists realized that animals who don’t gestate babies inside their bodies also react to the urine of pregnant women. The frog test utilized South African clawed frogs—a small, amenable amphibian that reacted strongly to the human chorionic gonadotropin present in a pregnant woman’s urine. After an injection into their dorsal lymph sac, a female frog will lay eggs in response within 12 hours.
