Live frogs and lady pee were an early pregnancy test
by Joyce Slaton posted in Products & Prizes
Long before you could buy a pee-on-a-stick pregnancy test for $10 in any drugstore, pregnancy tests took a different form altogether.
Frogs. Live frogs! And this was considered an improvement to the process. But let's back up just a smidge, well, a bit more than a smidge. Let's back up all the way to 1350 BCE, when the ancient Egyptians had already realized there was something special about pregnant-lady pee. Egyptian women wondering if they were pregnant were advised to pee on wheat and barley seeds. If the wheat sprouted, she was pregnant with a girl; if the barley sprouted, it was a boy. If nothing sprouted, she wasn't pregnant at all. Weirdly, this theory um, bears some fruit -- as the NIH tells us, a 1963 test found that 70 percent of the time urine from a pregnant woman would cause the seeds to sprout, while the urine from men or non-pregnant women did not. Go figure.
Urine-related pregnancy tests continued to develop as researchers speculated that there was something different about pregnant lady pee, although they were unsure just what it was. In the meantime, "piss prophets" tried to divine pregnancy by examining urine's color, by mixing it with alcohol, or by other dubious means.
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