The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

diarist Samuel Pepys in 1658, when he was twenty-five years old. This was two years before Pepys started his diary, so we don’t have a firsthand account of the experience, but he mentioned it frequently and vividly thereafter (including in the diary’s very first entry when he finally started it) and lived in loquacious dread of ever having to undergo anything like it again. It’s not hard to see why. Pepys’s stone was the size of a tennis ball (albeit a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was slightly smaller than a modern tennis ball, though the distinction could fairly be called academic to anyone carrying one). While four men held Pepys down, the surgeon, Thomas Hollyer, inserted an instrument called an itinerarium up his penis and into the bladder to fix the stone in place. Then he took a scalpel and quickly and deftly—but excruciatingly—cut a three-inch-long incision through the perineum