The Glass and the Stone
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Three questions per chapter. Each can be answered from the film and the sources on its chapter page.

Prologue: A Stone in a Jar

  1. Published dates for the El Amrah burial run from 4800 BC to a predynastic date after about 3800 BC. Where does each figure come from, and what does the film's 'more than five thousand years ago' commit to?
  2. The film quotes Elliot Smith's 1926 account as given by Waldron (2000), while an external fact-check proposed a 1930 wording. How should a historian weigh a quotation preserved in a secondary source against an unread primary text?
  3. Which details about the El Amrah stone in the secondary literature (its date, the word 'mummy', the boy's name, northern Egypt) show the film's rule that a thing repeated is not a thing proven?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 0:00

I. The River

  1. What exactly did Ruffer's 1910 finding establish, and what does it leave uncertain about the blood in the urine described in the papyri?
  2. What are the two readings of the Ankhmahor relief at Saqqara, and what kind of evidence would be needed to decide between them?
  3. Why does the film treat Egyptian reed catheters as a myth, and what evidence would be needed to overturn that verdict?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 2:12

II. The King's Permission

  1. Why is the Sushruta Samhita hard to date, and how does the film word its age to avoid stating a contested date as fact?
  2. Compare the lithotomy in the Sushruta Samhita with Celsus's: the rectal fingers, the side and shape of the incision, the choice of patient. What parallels exist, and why does the film's research warn against claiming a line of descent?
  3. What does the requirement of the king's permission, set beside the warning that death is almost certain without operation, suggest about how the text weighed operative risk?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 4:27

III. The Oath and the Ligature

  1. Contrast Adams's (1849) and Jones's (1923) translations of the Oath's stone clause. How does each support a different reading of what the clause forbids?
  2. Walk through Galen's ureteric ligation experiment step by step. Which step works as a control, and which shows that urine does not pass back from the bladder to the kidneys?
  3. Galen was right that the kidneys make urine and, by later standards, wrong about how. What was his attraction theory, why did he reject the sieve, and how long did his view hold?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 7:55

IV. The Flask

  1. Theophilus defined urine as 'colamentum sanguinis'. What does the phrase mean, how was urine understood within humoral medicine, and when did direct evidence of a glomerular filtrate finally appear?
  2. How did a medieval physician read a matula? Name the features judged besides colour, explain how the layers of the column were mapped onto the body, and say why the flask was made of clear glass with a rounded base.
  3. What were Thomas Brian's objections to uroscopy in The Pisse-Prophet (1637), and how does his own confession show where a pisse-prophet's information really came from?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 14:44

V. What the Water Knew

  1. Trace the evidence that diabetic sugar originates in the blood: what did Willis record, what did Dobson do with the urine and with the serum, and what did Dobson conclude about the kidney's role?
  2. What did Bowman (1842) and Ludwig (1843) each propose about how the glomerulus and tubule form urine, and why could neither side settle the question for about eighty years?
  3. Describe the Wearn and Richards micropuncture experiment: what was sampled, which tests were run, what did the comparison with bladder urine show, and why did their colleague say the result suggested but did not prove filtration?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 19:09

VI. The Stone-Cutters

  1. Cheselden reported 20 deaths in 213 lateral lithotomies and 3 deaths among 105 children aged ten or under, yet some modern summaries give about 50 per cent mortality. What does his age table allow a reader to conclude that a crude rate does not, and why should the 50 per cent figure be treated as an error?
  2. Two sets of figures exist for Frère Jacques's Paris series (about 60 cut with 25 deaths; 71 with 53.5 per cent mortality). Set them against Cheselden's estimate that the old method in Paris lost near two in five. What can and cannot be concluded about the early lateral operation?
  3. Endemic bladder stone disappeared from Norfolk by about 1909 without a proven cause. What evidence links it to diet in early childhood, why does the kit treat the mechanism as a hypothesis, and why is hard water not accepted as the explanation?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 26:32

VII. Breaking the Stone

  1. The 1835 commission accepted that large numbers have value but rejected Civiale's comparison of lithotomy and lithotrity. Which features of his pooled data did it object to, and which of those objections apply to observational comparisons of operations today?
  2. Double argued that statistics treat a patient as a fraction of the species and that mathematical certainty belongs to astronomy; Poisson disagreed. How does this exchange bear on the tension between population averages and the individual patient?
  3. Civiale's rule of short sittings held from the 1820s until 1878. What allowed Bigelow to overturn it, and what did he change in the technique and the instruments?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 33:41

VIII. Light

  1. Two Viennese bodies judged Bozzini's Lichtleiter in opposite ways in 1806-1807. What is secure about each verdict, and why should 'a magic lantern in the human body' be cited as a biographer's report rather than the faculty's own words?
  2. Trace where the light sat in urological endoscopes from Bozzini (1806) through Desormeaux (1853), Nitze and Leiter (1879), the lamp cystoscope (1887) and Hopkins and Storz (1967). What problem did each change solve, and what new problem did it bring?
  3. Henry Morris feared in 1904 that X-rays would deter surgical exploration, and Moses Swick's part in intravenous urography went unrecognised until 1966. What do these two episodes show about how a new diagnostic method is judged, and how credit for it is assigned?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 38:34

IX. The Gland That Stands Before

  1. What did J. William White's castration series of 1893 to 1895 show about the prostate, why was the operation abandoned, and how did Huggins's dog and patient studies of 1939 to 1941 return to the same biology?
  2. Transurethral resection needed three developments to come together. What were they, who supplied each, and why did the combination displace open prostatectomy for many men?
  3. Stamey's 1987 paper both launched PSA and warned that it was not specific. What did it find in men with benign enlargement, and how does the contamination of PLCO's control arm help explain why ERSPC and PLCO disagreed in 2009?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 48:14

X. Without the Knife

  1. How did the Brigham team establish that the Herrick twins were identical, and what ethical problem did taking a kidney from a healthy donor raise, according to Murray's own account?
  2. Shock-wave lithotripsy grew from two separate observations at Dornier. What were they, and how does the geometry of an ellipse let a spark outside the body break a stone inside it?
  3. Schuessler's team concluded in 1997 that laparoscopic radical prostatectomy offered no advantage over open surgery, and Lowrance and colleagues wrote in 2010 that robotic adoption had outrun high-quality evidence. What does this sequence show about how surgical techniques spread?

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 57:42

Epilogue: Look Again

  1. What did Kass's threshold of 100,000 bacteria per millilitre distinguish, and why does a culture below it not show that bladder urine is sterile?
  2. How did the expanded culture used by Hilt et al. (2014) differ from the standard urine culture in volume, media, atmosphere and time, and what proportion of the samples that grew bacteria had been reported as no growth?
  3. The film's rule is that a thing repeated is not a thing proven. Using either the sterile-urine teaching or the changing age of the El Amrah stone, show how a claim can outlast the evidence behind it.

Chapter page and sources Watch the chapter 1:03:12