That old men suffer with their prostates is a cliché as old as time. According to Hippocrates: ‘Diseases about the kidneys and bladder are cured with difficulty in old men’. 1 In the book of Ecclesiastes, in the Bible, old age is discussed, while writing in 1811, Sir Everard Home (1756–1832) was convinced that the phrase, ‘or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern’, represented the two principal effects of prostatic disease, the involuntary leakage of urine (the spilled water of the pitcher) and retention (the broken wheel preventing the drawing of water from the well). 2 However, at the time of the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews, the prostate was not recognised as a potential source of men’s urinary distress