- ^ The procedure, described by Pepys as being "cut of the stone", was conducted without anaesthetics or antiseptics and involved restraining the patient with ropes and four strong men. The surgeon then made an incision along the perineum (between the scrotum and the anus), about three inches (8 cm) long and deep enough to cut into the bladder. The stone was removed through this opening with pincers from below, assisted, from above, by a tool inserted into the bladder through the penis. A detailed description can be found in Tomalin (2002)
- ^ The stone was described as being the size of a tennis ball. Presumably, a real tennis ball, which is slightly smaller than a modern lawn tennis ball, but still an unusually large stone
- ^ On Monday 26 March 1660, he wrote, in his diary, "This day it is two years since it pleased God that I was cut of the stone at Mrs. Turner's in Salisbury Court. And did resolve while I live to keep it a festival, as I did the last year at my house, and for ever to have Mrs. Turner and her company with me."
- ^ There are references in the Diary to pains in his bladder, whenever he caught cold. In April 1700, Pepys wrote, to his nephew Jackson, "It has been my calamity for much the greatest part of this time to have been kept bedrid, under an evil so rarely known as to have had it matter of universal surprise and with little less general opinion of its dangerousness; namely, that the cicatrice of a wound occasioned upon my cutting of the stone, without hearing anything of it in all this time, should after more than 40 years' perfect cure, break out again." After Pepys' death, the post-mortem examination showed his left kidney was completely ulcerated; seven stones, weighing four and a half ounces (130 g), also were found. His bladder was gangrenous, and the old wound was broken open again.
- ^ This mention of Elizabeth Pepys' menstruation was omitted from the bowdlerised Wheatley transcription published in 1893 and used throughout this article. The quotation here uses the copyrighted Latham and Mathews edition to restore the text.
- ^ In Latham and Matthews's Companion to the diary, Martin Howard Stein suggests that Pepys suffered from a combination of astigmatism and long sight.
- ^ One of his clerks was Paul Lorrain who became well known as Ordinary of Newgate Prison
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