Nowadays it is very simple to know if a woman is pregnant or not. He approaches a pharmacy, buys a pregnancy test and in a matter of minutes he can know if he is pregnant or not (always taking into account the moment when the test is more reliable, of course).
We are so used to pregnancy tests that it is hard to think that at one time they did not exist and that the way to know if a woman was pregnant was quite different.
I am referring to frog test, a method that was used until the 60s and that works just like the tests of now, but changing the plastic and the red strip for a frog and the reaction it suffered.
As you know, because we have already commented on other occasions, the pregnancy test is not a test that says “pregnancy yes” or “pregnancy no”, but a test that reacts to a minimum amount of the Human Chorionic Gonadotropin hormone, better known as hCG.
The test in the frogs was very similar. Some of the woman's urine was injected with a syringe and she was waiting to see what reaction the frog suffered. If in the woman's urine there was enough hCG the frog ovulated and 24 hours after injecting the urine began to spawn. If this did not happen, it was considered that there was not enough hCG and therefore the woman was not pregnant.
Frogs were used several times to determine pregnancy, although it was necessary to wait 40 days to do it again. This test sounds unknown to many today, but it was used for no less than 40 years, since it was in the 1930s when researchers Lancelot Hogben, Zwarenstein and Shapiro discovered it. Well, to be honest it never stopped being used, because It is still used in some rural areas of Latin America, basically because, although it takes 24 hours to give the result, it is a very economical test to do.
The toad test
Years later, in 1947, Galli Mainini found a way to have a result much earlier. Mainini used toads instead of frogs and observed that if he injected urine into the dorsal lymphatic sac with sufficient hCG the toad ejaculated at three o'clock, then confirming the pregnancy.
Now these methods are almost forgotten and extinct because there are current tests that are faster, more reliable and easier to hunt.
