Peeling back the opening, he gently cut into the exposed and quivering bladder, thrust a pair of duck-billed forceps through the opening, captured the stone, and extracted it. The entire procedure from beginning to end took just fifty seconds but left Pepys bedridden for weeks and traumatized for life.* Hollyer charged Pepys twenty-four shillings for the operation, but it was money well spent. Hollyer was famous not just for his speed but also for the fact that his patients very generally survived. In one year, he performed forty lithotomies and lost not a single subject—an extraordinary
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