146 THE HORSE IN HISTORY 



Whether the advice he tendered in cases of 

 horse sickness was invarably sound is doubtful. 

 The amazing ignorance of the anatomy of the 

 human body that prevailed four hundred years 

 ago leads naturally to the inference that ignor- 

 ance of the anatomy of the horse must have been 

 even greater. Probably the advice tendered by 

 Wolsey was about upon a par in point of sound- 

 ness with the advice that passed current towards 

 the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the 

 sixteenth centuries for * 'wisdom in medicine and 

 chirurgery." 



Certainly we do not find allusion made to such 

 common modern ailments in horses as spavins, 

 navicular, ringbones and splints. Cracked heels 

 may have been a common frequent source of 

 lameness, for the shoes ordinarily used were 

 clumsy, crude things knocked into shape in a 

 rudimentary way, even those with which the 

 most valuable of horses were commonly shod. 



The horse breakers and trainers of the early 

 part of the sixteenth century seem to have been 

 of one opinion as to the most effectual way of, 

 so to speak, bringing a horse to his senses, and 

 that was the simplest way of all namely, by 

 starving him ! 



That so barbarous, and, let it be added so 

 wholly ineffectual a method should have been 

 resorted to where horses were concerned is per- 

 haps hardly to be wondered at when we bear in 



