Tashi Treadway (Johns Hopkins University)
Horse-human relations are corporeally intertwined. Human society developed alongside and thanks to domesticated horses. One area that showcases this co-dependence is veterinary medicine. Veterinary medicine has been carried out by humans to care for animals and human society has moved forward on the backs of animals, especially horses. According to Greek fragment T71 Suda χ 267 (Hesiod, 206), Chiron wrote the Ἱππιατρικόν (veterinary medicine), a combination of the words hippos and iatros. Chiron, as the mythical centaur and medical professional, represents the corporeal and health links between humans and horses.
To explore this co-dependence of human and equine bodies, this paper will examine Chiron in ancient art and literature, along with an analysis of two ancient veterinary texts. The works of Xenophon and Vegetius Renatus showcase the care of horses and the importance of veterinary medicine to the success of human endeavors such as war and agriculture. I will also examine human-horse relations historically. The hybrid figure of Chiron, as a half-horse, raises the topic of wildness and medicine. Human and veterinary medicine engage with the wildness of a body bringing it under control. Moreover, the human developments of agriculture and domestication have changed the natural world in ways that bring new, wild diseases that similarly invade human and animal bodies (Suzman, 227-228). Medicine, disease, and wildness blur the boundary lines between humans and animals, especially horses.
Bibliography:
Craik, Elizabeth M.. The ‘Hippocratic’ Corpus : Content and Context, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=1873796.
Dawson, Warren. “Chiron the Centaur.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 4, no. 3, 1949, pp. 267-275.
Fischer, Klaus-Dietrich. “Ancient Veterinary Medicine: A survey of Greek and Latin sources and some recent scholarship.” Medizinhistorisches Journal, vol. 23, no. ¾, 1988, pp. 191-209.
Gregory, Justina. Cheiron’s Way: Youthful Education In Homer and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Hausmann, Walter and Wolfgang Jöchle. “The discovery of Chiron’s cave, a prehistoric school of medicine for animals and humans.” The Canadian veterinary journal = La revue veterinaire canadienne vol. 29,10 (1988): 857-60.
Hesiod. Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia. Edited and translated by Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Holmes, Brooke. “Before the Physical Body.” The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 41–83, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7tbjr.7. Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.
Suzman, James. Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. New York : Penguin Press, 2021.
Willekes, Carolyn. The Horse in the Ancient World: From Bucephalus to the Hippodrome. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2016.
Yeates, James. Veterinary Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.