Preci: The Village of Surgeons Who Operated on Kings and Popes

Before Claude Bernard, before Pasteur, before modern medicine invented anaesthesia and antisepsis, there was Preci. A village of a few souls in the upper Valnerina, at 933 metres among beech trees and mountain streams, that for six centuries was one of the centres of the most advanced empirical surgery in the known world.

The school that came out of the abbey

The story begins at the Abbey of Sant'Eutizio, founded by the Benedictines in the sixth century just outside the village. The monks cultivated medicinal herbs, tended sick pilgrims, and passed down manuscripts of classical medicine. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forbade religious from practising surgery in abbeys. The Benedictines transferred their knowledge to the local laypeople — farmers and livestock breeders accustomed to castrating animals and treating wounds. Thus was born the Precian School of Surgery.

Lithotomy, cataracts, hernias

The surgeons of Preci specialised in three operations: extraction of bladder stones (lithotomy), cataract removal, and treatment of inguinal hernias. They invented their own instruments, developed techniques passed from father to son — the Norsini, Ceccarelli, and Fabrizi families were the most celebrated — and achieved a success rate of around 90 per cent, extraordinary for the era. The courts of France, Spain, and England, and the great hospitals of Rome and Florence called upon them. The Colot family, students of the Precians, still operated on Louis XIV.

What to see today

The village preserves an almost intact medieval fabric and a small museum of surgery. The Abbey of Sant'Eutizio, one kilometre north of Preci along a dirt road through the woods, is one of the most beautiful and least visited Romanesque monuments in Umbria: an austere twelfth-century facade with a carved portal, and inside, the tomb of the founding saint. Preci is about 25 kilometres from Norcia: the road passes through Apennine scenery of rare beauty.

When to go

Summer and early autumn are the ideal seasons: the upper Valnerina is cool even in August, and in October the beech trees turn to pure gold. The village is practically unknown to mass tourism.