Kyra, if you get any response to this, would you please also send the
PDF's or references along to me?
I can tell you that from fairly thorough review of the literature I have
never seen anything giving more than incidental treatment to this subject
-- without great detail. Nonetheless it is quite clear that East Asian
horse-keeping peoples faced the same common problems and maladies with
horses that we in the West still do. For example, in the volume entitled
"Imperial China: The Art of the Horse in Chinese History" (Bill Cooke,
ed., 2000, publ. by The Kentucky Horse Park), we find a pair of miniature
horse hoofs, which this catalog states "....were given by the Emperor as a
reward for services rendered to the Imperial Court" (Plate 115, p. 134).
The hoofs are exquisitely and precisely detailed small-scale copies of a
pair of hoofs from an actual horse -- but it was an actual horse who had
the obvious and characteristic signs of laminitis! And the feet are out of
anteroposterior and mediolateral balance in exactly the way characteristic
of chronically laminitic horses! So -- was there a persona veterinaria to
treat these animals? Did the Han dynasty understand laminitis/founder to
be due to spring/post-drought nonstructural carbohydrate flush in the
grass? Did they know that dosing the horse with magnesium oxide or
magnesium chloride could prevent the disease? Did they go stand the
animals in icewater when the feet began to heat up? We don't know! And for
that matter, I'd like to know what the Romans knew about the same type of
common management problems -- we DO know that at Vindolanda there was a
man (by name of Alio) who was the regimental veterinarian.
Other than the various exhibition catalogs for Russian and Chinese
exhibits that have come through the U.S. ("Scythian Gold" and so forth),
the best mine I could suggest from which to dig out this type of
information would be:
Basilov, Vladimir N., ed., 1989. Nomads of Eurasia. Translated by Mry
Fleming zirin. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, with the
University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Good luck with this! Surely it will prove to be a fertile area of
investigation, and I too would like to know more. -- Dr. Deb
> Dear Zooarchers,
>
> could anyone recommend reliable and detailed publications on nomadic
> veterinary medicine, especially for Eastern steppe peoples? The
> anthropological / ethnographic approach as well as the archaeological side
> of the problem would be interesting for me.
> Thanks a lot!
>
> best,
> Kyra
>
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