In his chief published work, Twelve Books of Medicine (Figure 1), 1 in which one whole book is devoted to ailments of the liver, the Greek itinerant physician Alexander of Tralles 2, * was the first to describe calculi in the human gallbladder 3 as "dried up humors concreted like stones." 4 Since then, gallstones and their manifestations have excited the interest of numerous scientific disciplines. Yet, this same Alexander Trallianus (525-605 CE)-whose practice of medicine and medical writings earned him high esteem throughout Byzantium and beyond-was not necessarily inherently interested in concretions in the gallbladder per se. Rather he regarded the unique finding of gallstones in the gallbladder in humans only indirectly, in that it provided the much sought-after explanation for the then age-old curiosity of jaundice associated with the disease that he and others had termed constipation (émpraxis, ἔμφραξις) of the liver, or liver obstruction. 3 The latter affliction had been recognized since Diocles of Carystus † (c.375-c.295 BCE), whom Pliny the Elder had described in his Natural History as next in age and fame to Hippocrates.Liver obstruction was attributed by the most renowned physician in Rome, Galen of Pergamon (129-216 CE), to stone-like coagulation (hóper líthos, ὥσπερ λίθος) of one of the four Hippocratic humors (Figure 2), namely, yellow bile, Hippocrates' "warm and dry like fire" choleric humor (shown in the right upper panel of Figure 2), to which hypothesis Trallianus readily subscribed. 5 Irrespective of a definite cause, in today's pathophysiological parlance this was obstructive jaundice, although in that cholestatic setting gallstones were rarely mentioned in the medical texts of antiquity, 4 save those by Trallianus 1,2 and Aristotle from Stagira. 6 Aristotle (384-322 BCE) reported in De Partibus Animalium that stones may be seen in the livers of sacrificed animals. It is unlikely that these calculi were explicitly identified as gallstones by Aristotle or any of his successors in antiquity 5,7,8 until the late Middle Ages. 9,10 In the Middle Ages, many mystic and mythical properties, as well as clinical signs, were attributed to gallstones. Pigmented stones from oxen were used by painters, sought by alchemists and apothecaries for draughts and potions, and the gallstones of Persian