How was pregnancy diagnosed before the invention of tests and analyses? You will be surprised!

In 1927, a young and talented British scientist by the name of Lancelot Hogben moved to South Africa: he was a zoologist and his favorite scientific experiment was the introduction of hormones in amphibians – in particular frogs. The Dark Continent obviously had a much greater variety of frogs than good old England, so Lancelot was hoping to make a big discovery in his area of ​​scientific interest – hormones. And he did.

For experiments, clawed frogs were best suited: they were incredibly numerous, it was easy to catch and work with them, so Hogben constantly experimented until he made an almost brilliant discovery.

In 1930, Hogben injected an experimental frog with an extract from the pituitary gland of an ox, and the frog suddenly began to spawn. At that time, it was already known that the urine of a pregnant woman also contains pituitary hormones, which means that frogs could be used as a live pregnancy test!

Lancelot returned to Britain and decided to test his hypothesis. His colleague Charles Bellerby learned how to raise the frogs properly so that they survived the bad climate and there were no males among them to mate with, but Hogben himself started the experiment.

He injected the women’s fresh urine under the skin of the amphibians. If the woman was pregnant, then after 5-12 hours the frog began to breed. Otherwise, nothing happened.

According to the results of the experiment, none of the 150 frogs laid eggs like this, and only 3 pregnancies turned out to be unidentified amphibians.

Before the story of the frog, pregnancy was defined as follows: a woman’s urine was injected into a young female mouse and after a few days the animal was killed to check whether the ovaries had grown or not? The mice were then replaced by rabbits. The method worked perfectly, but it was inhumane: for example, at one of the experimental stations, where any woman could apply, up to 6,000 animals were killed per year.

But there was no problem with the frogs: they didn’t need to be killed to evaluate the test result, the same frog could be used several times, they lived quite a long time with proper care and their maintenance did not requires almost no cost.

And until the 1960s, when they discovered chorionic gonadotropin (the same hormone that made frogs spawn) and created a chemical test to detect it, clawed frogs functioned as “pregnancy tests.”

However, the poor buggers were not left alone even after this discovery: clawed frogs were used to study the work of cells, the development of organs and embryos, they were one of the first cloned animals. And continue to be the main laboratory animals.