Uromancy
Since ancient times man has been trying to read the future based on nature, everyday objects and himself. One way was to read from your own or animal urine. The past tense is not insignificant here, now this method is disappearing min. through the development of medicine. The expression uromancy comes from Greek in which the word ouron means urine.
History and practice
The history of uromancy dates back to the time of ancient cultures that practiced this method of divination in many ways. The most popular methods of interpreting uromancy were:
analyzing the color
analyzing the taste
analyzing the smell
analyzing the patterns created after spilling onto the ground or a spinning bowl
The ancient Romans, known for their eager use of divination in everyday life and matters of state importance, used uromania to look for bubbles after urinating in a vessel. When the bubbles were present, they were large and far apart, the person to whom the urine belonged could have expected a large sum of money. It was also a good omen for emotional life. Lack of bubbles or their small size and proximity was synonymous with bad luck, illness or death of a loved one.
Knowledge of the sex of the child has always aroused emotions, also among women living centuries ago. They used uromancy to predict the sex of the child. Also, women who were getting ready to marry used this method to check whether their marriage would be successful and whether they would be happy for a long time.
Witches did not have an easy life, not only because of their deaths and the ways they were used to detect them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among witch hunters there was a popular method that consisted of placing iron nails, pins and needles in a cylinder filled with the urine of the accused (most often they were women, but men were checked in this way). Such a bottle was closed with a stopper and waiting for whether the cork would fall out of the bottle by itself or whether the suspect would suddenly fall ill if he was found guilty.
Medical point of view
Before the invention of stethoscopes and blood tests, urine observations were the basis for divination of the patient’s condition. The Greek-Roman physician Galen (131-201) had a great impact on this state of affairs. Later doctors believed that urine was an essential element in assessing the state of liver health in which blood was to be produced. In order to systematize the interpretation of urine color, a circle was created with an illustration and description of the individual 20 colors from white to ruddy.
To make the observation as best as possible, glass flasks with a round bottom in the shape of a bladder were created. The medical profession in distant times was not very grateful. Because in addition to the color of urine, its smell and taste were also studied . In 1674, English physician Thomas Willis described the diabetic’s urine as “wonderfully sweet, as if it were saturated with honey or sugar.” He also noted that diabetic urine often has a honey color.
According to the book The Pisse-Prophet (1655) by doctor Thomas Brain, diseases were divided by uromancer into two types: acute and chronic. The dark color of the urine meant acute illness, and the weak, watery urine indicated chronic illness.
Today’s medicine is at a level where the doctor does not have to try to urinate or smell the smell. Probably most of us used to urinate or will do so. The process involves passing urine into a small cup. Then it is assigned to the patient and examined on the spot, or sent to a special laboratory, where the whole process is taken by the machines. The doctor gets very detailed results (hemoglobin, white blood cells, red blood cells etc.) on the basis of which he assesses whether everything is fine.
Receiving results often doesn’t take 24 hours. In sports competitions, where doping is detected this way, the whole process is even faster. Uromancy is one of those methods of divination after which no one will cry, one would like to write that it was charming and fascinating, but it would be hard to talk about the truth then. However, it had its contribution to the development of medicine, and urine color still plays information about the condition of individual human organs.