From fertility charms to frog pregnancy tests: the strange history of conception

Long before two blue lines, pregnancy was confirmed with urine, seeds, superstition and some truly bizarre experiments. But did any of them work?

Getty / Madame de Cham-Renaud

Published: April 21, 2026 at 4:17 PM

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With people preparing their bodies for pregnancy months in advance, digital pregnancy tests and ovulation trackers, conceiving feels very scientific these days. But that hasn’t always been the case.

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Before modern medical advances, conception was a decidedly mysterious process, and people had to rely on physical markers and old wives’ tales for their information.

We’ve rounded up some of the bizarre and unusual ways people throughout history have tried to improve their fertility, conceive, and confirm their pregnancies.

Theories of conception: seeds and heat

We now know exactly how sperm and eggs interact to make a baby, but in the early modern period, they had two main theories for how babies were made.

The first theory was that both men and women produced ‘seed,’ which combined in the womb and essentially fought it out to determine what sex the baby would be.

The other theory said that the man provided the ‘seed,’ which was the active force that led to a baby being formed, while the woman provided the ‘raw materials’ with which to build the baby — this was usually assumed to be menstrual blood.

It was widely believed that a woman needed to orgasm to conceive, because a certain level of ‘heat’ was necessary.

According to conception manuals published in the 17th century, a woman should lie on her right side after intercourse to conceive a male child, so that the ‘seed’ would fall to the right side of the womb. The right side of the body was seen as the ‘male’ side.

Amulets, charms, and prayers

From ancient Egyptians to Italian Catholics, women have looked to their spiritual and religious beliefs to bolster their chances of conceiving and carrying successfully through a pregnancy.

In ancient Rome, some women wore amulets inscribed with magical formulas and images of uteruses that could be opened/closed with a key. These were meant to help the woman become pregnant when she wanted to and to help ease labour.

Whereas in England in the 17th century, women might wear a girdle inscribed with prayers or Bible verses to encourage a safe pregnancy and delivery.

Herbal and food remedies

Herbal remedies were used for all sorts of medical reasons, including conception, pregnancy care, and post-labour. Meanwhile, food was seen as an important part of maintaining health, because different foods were thought to affect the levels of the four humours in the body — blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm — which needed to be in perfect balance for perfect health.

For example, eating lots of meat was thought to help fertility in women struggling to conceive in the 16th and 17th centuries. And in the 15th century, women who wanted to conceive were told to eat leeks and trout boiled in goat’s milk before having sex.

Drinking a mixture of honey and wine

In his book Aphorisms, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates suggested that women should drink a mixture of honey, wine, and water if they wanted to check if they were pregnant. If they were, their stomachs would rumble and hurt.

Four early attempts to use urine to prove pregnancy

1. Weeing on wheat and barley

A 3,500-year-old Egyptian papyrus reveals an ancient pregnancy test that involves a woman weeing on two bags of grains — one wheat and one barley.

If the barley bag sprouted, the woman was pregnant with a boy, and if the wheat bag sprouted, she was pregnant with a girl. If neither bag sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant.

Researchers in 1963 tried this method out, and found that there could actually be some truth to this trick. The wheat and barley did actually sprout when soaked with pregnant women’s wee, but not when soaked in men’s and non-pregnant women’s wee.

The researchers thought that the hormones in a pregnant woman’s urine potentially helped the seeds grow.

2. Injecting frogs with wee

Frog

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Weeing on frogs was another way people tested whether they were pregnant — until surprisingly recently!

Technically, women didn’t wee on the frogs, but between the 1940s and 70s in the UK, doctors could confirm a woman was pregnant by injecting her urine into the skin on the back of an African clawed frog. If she was pregnant, the frog would ovulate and a small cluster of eggs would appear if it was a female, or male frogs would produce sperm.

3. Leaving a needle in wee

In the Medieval period, some textbooks recommended women put a needle in a pot of their wee. If it turned red or black, they were pregnant.

Helen King, professor of Classical Studies at The Open University, writes in The Conversation that at some point, this got misread or misheard as ‘nettle’ instead of ‘needle.’ This lead to the belief that if you left a nettle in a pregnant woman’s wee overnight, it would develop red spots.

4. Mixing wee with wine

Some people tried analysing the wee itself to determine if a woman was pregnant. This was done by various physicians all the way from 1300BC in the Ancient Egyptian times up until the 1600s. They would look at the colour and texture of a woman’s wee and make a judgement based on how yellow it was, whether there was any cloudiness, or if there was a ‘cotton-like mass’ or granules presence in the wee — things which we now know are actually dependent on how much water you have drank and deficiencies or diseases you might have.

Some physicians did tests with the urine, too, such as mixing it with wine. Cornelis van Solingen, working in the 17th century, said that “if the liquid becomes turbid, as though beans had been cooked therein, then the woman is pregnant.”

If none of these worked…

If they didn’t have access to any of these tests, or they didn’t work, women would simply have to look for symptoms of pregnancy, such as morning sickness, swollen breasts, or strange cravings for things like earth or coal.

Of course, they would know if they had missed periods, too, but this wasn’t necessarily a reliable sign because malnutrition or continuous breastfeeding could affect their menstrual cycle for a different reason.

“Quickening,” or the first movements of a baby, usually provided real certainty at around four months in.

As these practices show, history is full of inventive — and often baffling — attempts to explain the miracle of conception and to confirm pregnancy. While many of these methods sound strange now, they reveal just how deeply people have always wanted answers, reassurance and a little control over one of life’s biggest mysteries.

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Today’s digital tests may be faster and far more accurate, but the hope, curiosity and anticipation behind them haven’t changed one bit.

Authors

Serafina Kenny journalist headshot

Serafina KennyDigital Journalist

Serafina Kenny is a Digital Journalist at MadeForMums. She writes news and features and has expertise in health, nutrition, relationships, and history. She has previously written for Business Insider, Women's Health, Stylist, Men's Health US, The i Paper, Dazed, and more. You can contact her with tips and story ideas (or compliments!) at serafina.kenny@immediate.co.uk.

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