Is it true that frogs were successfully used to determine pregnancy?

According to a common opinion, before to determine whether a woman is pregnant or not, her urine was subcutaneously introduced to frogs, and if the amphibian soon put off the caviar, this meant that the woman was expecting a child. We decided to check whether there was such an unusual way of diagnosis in fact.

Such practice is reported "Russian newspaper" And Wonderzine. About her Writes And in his lectures, a candidate of biological sciences, a popularizer of science and the leading podcast “Naked Zamlep” Ilya Kolmanovsky tells. This method of determining pregnancy called Hogben's test named after his discoverer. Mentions of him in English are found in magazines Smithsonian, The Atlantic and even in many scientific And archival articles on Pubmed.

The inventor of the test is the scientist Lancelot Hogben, also known for the creation of an artificial intergloss language. He Interested in Hormones, their functions and actively experimented with the introduction of various hormones with an experimental animal. In 1927, the scientist moved to South America and decided on his favorite among experimental animals. They became a clawed frog - Xenopus laevis. The animal was distinguished by unpretentiousness to the living conditions and a rather high life expectancy in captivity - up to 30 years. Hogben was so carried away by xenopus that even He called it In their honor their own house.

In 1930 Hogben Introduced Xenopusa extract from a bull pituitary gland, noting in its records that after that the frog put off the caviar. At that time, science already knew that the pituitary gland was responsible for the production of hormones that regulate the functions of the ovaries, therefore, during pregnancy, their concentration changed. Hogben and his colleague Charles Belllerbi made sure that without mating, the frog did not lay off the caviar spontaneously, therefore, if, after the woman’s urine is introduced to her, she clearly indicates that the woman is pregnant.

According to research 1938, in which 150 experimental animals “took part”, the frogs did not give a single false positive result and gave only three false negative (that is, they did not feel the occurreed pregnancy). Thus, Hogben's test had a rather high sensitivity. How He wrote One grateful doctor in a letter to Hogben and colleagues: "From one doctor of general practice with many years of experience, only a frog was a frog and a frog of law." Additional factor, contributing to its distribution, it was that frogs could only be used in a week, which ensured its high accessibility, the result of the test could be obtained within a day.

Later, in the 1950s, in the USSR to determine the pregnancy of steel use Not only females, but also males, who, after the urine of the pregnant woman, sowed spermatozoa. Moreover, it turned out that not only xenopuses, but also other subspecies of amphibians are suitable for these purposes. Only in the 1960s appeared Chemical laboratory test for the definition of pregnancy, and in 1967, American Margaret Crane I came up withHow to make a test as compact and easy to use so that women can use it on their own at home. At the same time, in 2012 there was Conducted Publicly, the last Hogben test today - a frog named Loretta has received a woman who has recently been an IVF protocol. The experiment combined the performance of the performance, the audience had access to the direct broadcast of the injection and further observation of the frog, everyone was looking forward to when the frog would lay caviar. She did not postpone. The three chemical tests carried out after this confirmed the correctness of Loretta - the IVF procedure was unsuccessful.

Thus, there is no doubt that the “frog” test, or Hogben’s test, existed. The method had understandable mechanics and quite wide availability. Enough evidence has been preserved in favor of the fact that this is a working procedure, and not a modern fiction.

Is it true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. "Men thought it was immoral": the story of the invention of a pregnancy test
2. "Little Revolution": how a woman came up with the first convenient pregnancy test