History: He performed the first ever lithotripsy – on himself … with a knitting needle
Romancing the stone: It took him six months of scraping to coax out the calculi
Feel free to pre-emptively cross your legs in discomfort for this one.
When Colonel Claude Martin, a French army officer in the East India Company, developed bladder stones in 1782, he found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Although in excruciating pain, he was rightly hesitant to go to a doctor. The treatment at the time was an often-fatal perineal lithotomy, where surgeons cut out the calculi — sans anaesthesia.
So Colonel Martin decided to take matters into his own hands.
