Mr. Pepys suffered from stone in the bladder before he began to keep a diary. He does not appear to have been physically a hero; had he been a general, no doubt he would have led his army bravely from the rear except in case of a retreat; but so great was the pain that he submitted his body to the knife on March 26, 1658. Anæsthetics in those days were rudimentary, relaxing rather than anæsthetizing the patient. There is some reason to believe that they were extensively used in the Middle Ages, and contemporaries of Shakespeare seem to have looked on their use as a matter of course; but for some reason they became less popular, and by the seventeenth century most people had to undergo their operations with little assistance beyond stout hearts and sluggish nervous systems. Cutting for the stone was one of the earliest of surgical operations. In ancient days it was first done in India, and the glad news that stones could be successfully removed from the living body filtered through to the Greeks some centuries before Christ. Hippocrates knew all about it, and the operation is mentioned in that Hippocratic oath according to which some of us endeavour to regulate our lives. At first it was only done in children, because it was considered that adult men would not heal properly, and the only result in them would be a fistula. The child was held on the lap of some muscular assistant, with one or two not less muscular men holding its arms and legs. The surgeon put one or two fingers into the little anus and tried to push the stone down on to the perineum, helped in this manœuvre by hypogastric pressure from another assistant. He then cut transversely above the anus, strong in the faith that he might, if the gods willed, open into the neck of the bladder. Next he tried to push out the stone with his fingers still in the anus; it is not quite clear whether he would take his fingers out of the anus and put them into the wound or vice versa; this failing, he would seize the stone with forceps and drag it through the perineum. As time went on it was discovered that more than three or four assistants could be employed, using others to sit on the patient’s chest, thus adding the _peine forte et dure_ to the legitimate terrors of ancient surgery and surrounding him with a mass of men. Imbued with a spirit of unrest by the struggles of the patient the mass swayed this way and that, until it was discovered that by adding yet more valiants to the wings of the “scrum,” who should answer heave with counter-heave, the resultant of the opposing forces would hold even the largest perineum steady enough for the surgeon to operate; and men came under the knife for stone. Next the patient was tied up with ropes, somewhat in the style we used in our boyhood’s sport of cock-fighting. What a piece of work is the Rope! How perfect in all its works--from the Pyramids--built with the aid of the Rope and the Stick--to the execution of the latest murderer.