Many techniques have changed throughout medical history as science and our understanding of the human body has developed. This includes using leeches and bloodletting techniques to treat headaches, as well as lobotomies and drilling a hole in our skulls (trepanning) to deal with mental illness.
However, one medical diagnostic tool that remains as important today as it did 500 years ago is Urology – or the study of wee.
While the average person might be able to tell if they've eaten too much beetroot from the red colour of their wee, or drunk too much alcohol from its fermented smell; medical experts can use urine analysis to detect everything from Chlamydia to cancer.
This practice dates as far back as the 1300s but was popularised in the 1500s, when medieval physicians compiled their analyses of sick people's urine to create a "Urine Wheel" – with 20 different categories based on sight, taste, and smell.
In a world without X-rays and blood tests, this was one of the main tools that rudimentary doctors had to understand what was going on inside their patient's bodies.
Just like with modern medical analysis of wee, physicians in the 1500s were not just checking the colour. Through putting their patient's wee in a succession of vials, they would check its consistency, clarity and the presence of sediment.
These urine properties were broken down into 20 categories of diagnosis, requiring the examiner to be able to distinguish between 20 different tastes and smells of urine.
Using the urine wheel, 17th century English physician Thomas Willis made an early diabetes discovery, noting that the urine of a diabetic patient tasted “wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”
However, while this method of analysis has changed little over the centuries, their diagnoses have improved considerably.
The Royal College of Physician's rare books librarian Katie Birkwood, described how one text of "Uroscopy" showed how to practitioners: "urine was thought to reveal imbalances of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm)."
According to the 1300 text 'On Urine', this could reveal almost anything. For example, a white or pale urine could mean "spleen, dropsy, intoxication, nephritis, delirium, diabetes, rheumatism, black bile, epilepsy, dizziness, chill of liver, or (with a bilious fever) death."
If you think your humours might be upset, or had a funny-looking wee, you can take a look at a medieval urine wheel on the New York Academy of Medicine's website.
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