Читать книгу Fractures in the Horse - Группа авторов - Страница 15

Throughout the Middle Ages (circa 500–1500 CE), horses continued to play a major role in warfare with increasing numbers employed in agriculture and transport. In the early Middle Ages, Western medicine in general was dominated by religious (Christian) doctrine; science in the currently accepted sense was neither considered nor applied. Further discussion on fractures is found in republications of the ancient works of Chiron the Centaur (circa 400 CE) and Vegetius Ranatus (450–500 CE). The latter was translated from Latin to English in 1748 as ‘Distempers of Horses’ and includes a chapter (two pages) on fractures. Open limb fractures were recognized as ‘almost incurable’. For closed fractures, bandages, splints and slings were recommended. The latter fitted so that the horse ‘may not touch the ground with his foot, lest the fracture should move to and fro in a lamentable manner’. Vengetius Ranatus instructed that the horse must not be allowed to stand on the fractured limb for 40 days ‘for that is the time when things that are broken, or torn asunder, or disjoined, are consolidated’ [11].

The Mamluks, who ruled Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517, are thought to have used orthopaedic bandages containing resins from Boswellia plants and pitch from cedar and tannűb trees to heal broken bones in horses [12]. There is also iconographic evidence of care of horses with fractures: binding a fractured metacarpus in a horse suspended in a sling is illustrated in Mending the fractured metacarpal of the horse (1390) from Libro de menescalcia e de albeyteria et fisica de las bestias (a Spanish text from the Middle Ages) and in the fifteenth‐century work of Johan Alvares de salami Ella's. A fractured pelvis from the fourteenth to sixteenth century was recovered from the Cumanian settlement of Karcag‐Organdaszentmiklós, Hungary. The fracture involved the ilial shaft and was displaced, but there was sufficient adjacent new bone to suggest that this was of multiple months’ duration during which period the horse was considered to have been ‘immobilized’ [13].