Samuel Pepys’ bladder stone was the size of a tennis ball. A 17th-century tennis ball, slightly smaller than today’s, though I doubt the distinction was much comfort.
In 1658, at age 25, he went through probably the most famous lithotomy (stone removal) in history. Four men held him down. Surgeon Thomas Hollyer inserted an instrument through the penis to fix the stone in place, cut about eight centimetres through the perineum, opened the bladder and pulled the stone out with duck-bill forceps.
The whole thing took 50 seconds.
Pepys spent weeks in bed and was traumatized for life: he mentions it even in the very first entry of his diary.
Hollyer charged 24 shillings, and was famous both for his speed and for the fact that most of his patients survived: one year he did 40 lithotomies without losing a single one. For the time, an outrageous feat.
The past was rubbish.
I found this in Bill Bryson’s The Body (the note paraphrases his account; the quote I originally saved was too long to republish verbatim).