No stone cutting here

I was watching a rerun of House last night (I'd recorded it so it may have run earlier this week, the whole series is in reruns on USA network) when Foreman (Forman? I'm not sure how his name is spelled) asked House if he'd ever heard of the Hippocratic to which House gave a smart answer that included the words "do not cut those who labor under the stone."

What was this? Some sort of no operating on Freemason's oath? No cutting of those slaves who worked in the quarries? What? I was confused. So I looked up the Hippocratic Oath at Wikipedia and this is what I found:

I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.

The article goes on to say that barbers, who as we all know were the precursers to surgueons, hence the blood striped barber poles, were in charge of removing bladder stones. That's what kind of stone is being discussed, kidney and bladder stones. Which is interesting but the language is different from House's precise words. Next I found this:

Conclusion

The original Hippocratic oath admonished us to "not cut those who labor under the stone" because of the disastrous complications that accompanied ancient attempts at removal of urinary calculi.

So labor under the stone is laboring because urinary calculi are so painful and you have to pass them? Like delivering a child? That kind of labor?

These are the kinds of questions that motivate most of my web searches. Twenty years ago I would have had to go to the library and likely forgotten what it was I wanted to find out. God bless the interwebs.