Clár na nÁbhar: :: Library Catalog

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Sonraí bibleagrafaíochta
Príomhchruthaitheoir:	Sanvico, Michele
Formáid:	Recurso digital
Teanga:	Béarla
Foilsithe / Cruthaithe:	Zenodo 2026
Ábhair:	Medieval history
Rochtain ar líne:	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18514044
Clibeanna:	Cuir clib leis Níl clibeanna ann, Bí ar an gcéad duine le clib a chur leis an taifead seo!

Clár na nÁbhar:

The present essay, the first in the series “The Norcia Historical Papers”, is devoted to the astounding, surprising history of the Precian Surgical School and its  Precian surgeons, the proficient operators from Preci, a small hamlet lying near the town of Norcia, central Italy, who won for themselves the greatest renown and appreciation across the whole of Europe, between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. Their history has never been thoroughly told. Up to recent times, not many historians have been confronting with the astounding tradition that was born, possibly around the thirteenth century, within a tiny castle lost in a remote valley which stands at the foot of the Sibillini Mountain Range, a portion of the Italian Apennines raising its lofty peaks between the provinces of Umbria and Marche. From the nineteenth century onwards, Precian surgeons — also known as 'Norcini', owing to their proximity to Norcia, the hometown of St. Benedict — have been almost forgotten by scholars, with only a handful of mentions that can be retrieved in contemporary medical essays and research papers, often in footnotes, and often written in a dismissive tone. Yet, it is undeniable that Precian surgery has marked, for at least three centuries, the history of surgery in Europe. Since the late Middle Ages, the renowned surgeons from Preci, belonging to a limited number of families from the small hamlet, have been bringing their peculiar craft throughout Europe: actually they have been considered, for hundreds of years, as the specialists of choice for carrying out tough, hazardous surgical operations such as lithotomy, as well as other troublesome surgical treatments, marked by specific hardships and technicalities which required a dedicated know-how, and were unwillingly addressed by physicians owing to the high inherent risks of failure, leading to the death of the patient. Lithotomy, cataract couching, hernia surgery, castration: the Precians were not afraid to carry out internal surgery, the bloody, high-risk, terrifying operations that physicians and medical doctors did not want to deal with, following that particularly sinister, alarming prescription purposedly included in the Hippocratic Oath and intended for doctors in antiquity, but still fully valid during the Middle Ages: «I will not use the knife, verily, on sufferers from the stone, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft». So the surgeons of Preci could find their own way across a world of unwilling physicians, who traditionally considered surgery as a minor art with respect to medicine: they had to fight for success against a plethora of empirical surgeons, barbers, itinerant swindlers, charlatans and 'cerretani', who infested the surgical arena — an arena left unguarded by physicians — in Italy and Europe, awkwardly performing their operations often without any real skill and bringing a good portion of their patients to death. The astounding fact is that the Precians actually succeeded: their name — collectively indicated as 'Precian Surgical School', even though no official school has ever formally seen the light — began to run far and wide across all European countries. And they were summoned everywhere to treat monarchs and kings and queens, with their proficient hands who bravely and efficiently extracted multifariously-shaped stones from patients' bladders, restored the vision capabilities of men and women affected by cataract, and effectively reduced inguinal hernias. At the peak of their golden age, in the eighteenth century, they were even employed at major hospitals in many towns and cities, providing their services side by side with the most prominent, most haughty medical doctors. But how could a small hamlet in central Italy — Preci — generate so illustrious a surgical tradition? No historian has ever succeeded in understanding what has been going on, in Preci, a remote castle lost in a secluded valley neighboring the Sibillini Mountain Range, during the thirteenth century. Something just exploded there; a number of conditions just met together in that place, at that very time. A sort of chemical reaction got started, fuelled by specific ingredients, intertwined within a recipe that has not had the chance to repeat itself elsewhere. For the first time ever, in the present essay we are going to reconstruct the conditions that were in place and at work in thirteenth-century Preci. We will describe the elements which, at that time, made that land so peculiar in terms of experiences and presence in the territory of specific establishments. We will be addressing the life of the peasants of the castles of Norcia, and pigs' raising and slaughtering; and we will enter the gates of the Abbey of St. Eutychius, near Preci, with its library, 'scriptorium' and benedictine monks, and of the Hospital of St. Lazzaro of Valloncello, with its leper colony and compelling needs for surgical services. We will bring to the table all the pieces of this peculiar jigsaw puzzle, and we will try to fit them together so as to generate a meaningful, plausible image. To do this, we will need to introduce a conjectural, most significant element; and yet, conjectural as it may be, this piece is not only mandatorily required by our assumption, but it is also historically sound, as its actual existence is attested, as a veritable matter of fact, by the very same existence and origin of a Precian Surgical School. In the above scenario, we will try provide a description of the original founder of the Precian Surgical School: a brilliant, ingenious, charismatic initiator, who first housed in his young, illiterate heart the wish to help his neighbours, by treating their infirmities, of which he could see plenty at the Hospital of St. Lazzaro of Valloncello, set just a few miles from Preci. We will never know his name, as earthquakes and fires have annihilated much of the written memories dating back to such early times; nonetheless, we will try to honor his memory, as a local, genial protagonist of his age, endowed with sensitivity, intelligence and an outstanding talent. But our conjecture will not be set out in a desert. We will rebuild the whole framework in which the Precian Surgical School has been operating for many hundreds of years, from its very origin to its final end in the nineteenth century, with a view to outlining the context in which the Precians originated and achieved their outstanding renown across so many years throughout Europe. We will retrace part of the illustrious history of medicine during the Middle Ages — even though, of course, it is beyond the scope of the present paper to present a thorough description of the history of medicine. We will provide some basic elements concerning the preservation of the Greek-Roman medical tradition across the Middle Ages, together with a brief illustration of medieval surgery and surgeons. Our steps will lead us through many centuries, with a visit to the Hippocratic Oath, a perusal of medical essay written by Roman authors, a sojourn at benedictine abbeys and hospitals, and then across the full history of the Precians, from their first official appearances in Norcia and Florence, to their arrival in Rome; and their further expansion in many Italian towns and European countries, up to their golden age in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries; and, at last, their final decline at the very end of their most brilliant period, substantially erased by a medical world that was taking different routes, leaving behind the remnants of a surgery that still was rooted in the partition between medicine and manual craft typical of the Middle Ages. Thus, in the present essay, we will narrate part of the glorious history of medicine: the ancient, illustrious art of healing infirmities in human beings. It will be also a portion of the daring adventure of surgery, the antique, hazardous craft of working on a living person's body by using careful, resolute hands to remove, amid the flesh and the blood, the origin of an illness and restore patient's health. As a matter of fact, the present paper intends to position itself as the most complete, most comprehensive essay ever written, at least to date, with relation to Preci, the Precian Surgical School, and its amazing, illustrious surgeons.

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