Apropos “Cut of the Stone”. I read a book about history of surgery and one chapter was about a guy who remove his own bladder stone. Back then people didn’t have great hygiene and urinary track infections were common. Those would cause bladder stone that would get worse and worse witch each infection. The stone would block the urethra entrance so you would feel you like really need to pee but once you stand up you wouldn’t be able to. This wasn’t very pleasant so people would try to remove the stones. Typical way was to go through the taint, open the bladder, remove the stone. There’s a lot of blood vessels there so survival chances were not great. Doctors refused to do it because patients would die to often and then family would blame them and they had enough shit to deal with already. So you had traveling bladder stone removers. They would do the surgery and by the time patient would die they would be on the road again.

So this one guy, a blacksmith, tried to get his stone removed twice or had two stones removed already, it’s not clear. Anyway, he didn’t like the traveling stoncutters. So he got a sharp knife, asked some guy to assist him and did the surgery himself.