How things have changed!

You probably won't be able to comprehend just how wonderful technology is, unless you lived in the 1950's!

For instance, what does it take nowadays to test for pregnancy?  A few minutes?  Back in the 1950's it could take up to a week, and to be obsolutely sure, even three weeks!

It also took rather more than a small kit bought from a high street chemist. 

It took a whole hospital laboratory, which required:-

Several tank fulls of very large toads

2 laboratory assistants

1 packer

1 cleaner

1 filing clerk

1 secretary

1 laboratory technician

At 18, I went to work at the PDC (Pregnancy Diagnostic Centre) at my local hospital.  I'd always being very interested in biology, and working with toads held no fear far me, even though they were huge!  I actually felt quite sorry for them, for what they had to go through.   These toads where shipped all the way from South Africa, and those that survived the tests, were shipped all the way back again, we had to have a constant supply of 'fresh' toads!

The first task of the morning was to lable the many bottles of urine that arrived either by hand or through the post.  The bottles came in all shapes and sizes, from tomato sauce bottles to pickle jars and the urine came in a wide variety of colours! ( I know, I know - too much information lol!) each had to be well labelled and had its own identification number. 

The urine then had to be neutralized using water and chemicals, then whizzed inside a centrifuge before being tested on litmus paper, if we didn't get the correct neutrality, the urine, which was to be injected into the toads, would cause burning to various degrees - I would feel horribly guilty when this happened.

There was quite a knack to holding the toads to expose the pouch on their back where the urine had to be injected, one grasped the back legs with the index finger in between the thighs. The toads where then put into large, individual  jars of water and left to spawn - or not......

24 hours later we would check the jars for signs of spawning, then we would do a second test - hopefully, the first and second tests matched, if they didn't we would have to segregate the specimens, do another test and keep a careful eye on the results.

Very special attention was given to specimens that came in from Doctors who's patients were under age.  I remember well the 'case history' attached to one specimen - the boy and girl involved were only eleven years old.  We had to do the test three times - each time the result was positive, and this was in the 1950's.......

Unfortunatley, I spent a great deal of time in the casualty department, which was just a short walk from the laboratory.  It was only too easy to prick ones fingers on dirty needles, which then turned septic, or pick up germs on our feet wading through dirty water.  We used to make our own pippettes, and I still have the scars on my fingures to remind me of the ones I broke in the process!

I would often have nightmarish dreams involving the toads, as they had cannibalistic tendencies, so eventually I decided I'd had enough, and went back to being a telephonist!