It’s easy to forget that all of us have built-in tools for chemical analysis. Before biting into a filet of fish, your nose…
It’s easy to forget that all of us have built-in tools for chemical analysis. Before biting into a filet of fish, your nose tells you if it is rotten with microbes that will make you sick. And if your nose fails, hopefully your taste buds warn you before swallowing. Today we use our senses of smell and taste for eating, but before the invention of pH meters and microscopes, physicians relied on their noses and mouths to diagnose diseases.
What substance could doctors use that contained information about the health of a patient’s entire body? It would have to be the dumping ground for chemicals in the digestive system, blood stream, and endocrine system. That’s right; doctors once tasted urine to diagnose their patients’ sicknesses. They used charts like this one from 1506 to match illnesses with the colors, tastes, and smells of different types of urine. In fact, physicians didn’t even have to meet their patients to diagnose them as long as they had a sample of their pee and a “urine wheel.”
Urine could be salty, sticky, thick like molasses, or cloudy and white, which possibly indicated pregnancy. One disease that was easy to distinguish was diabetes. Because diabetes prevents the body from absorbing sugar, all of that sweetness ends up filtered out of the bloodstream and into the urine. However appetizing that sounds, I wouldn’t recommend trying uroscopy at home.
Image: A urine wheel from the 1506 book Epiphanie Medicorum by Ullrich Pinder. (The Royal Library, Copenhagen)