If Looks Could Kill
Hello, mystery fans, and welcome to another episode of Horse Mysteries.
This week – despite Dave’s enthusiasm for “m-u-u-u-rder” – we change things up with a medical mystery. The story of a mysterious illness that affected thousands of horses and the single horse that started it all.
We hope you enjoy this week’s mystery and thanks for listening.
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If Hugh Laurie had starred in a medical mystery drama called “Horse” instead of “House,” it might have unfolded like this week’s episode! It was fascinating to hear how greed and pride led to this genetic defect getting passed down.
As you were rattling off the many ailments that horses can suffer from, I flashed back to a speech I had to memorize when I was in The Taming of the Shrew. I played Biondello whose master Petruchio is about to marry Katherine, but he’s keeping everyone waiting. Biondello runs in to report Petruchio is on his way but he’s wearing crazy old clothes and riding the horse equivalent of a junker of a car:
“…his horse hipp’d, with an old motley saddle and stirrups of no kindred; besides, possess’d with the glanders and like to mose in the chine, troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of windgalls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoil’d with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, sway’d in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legg’d before…”
Which roughly translates as “…a swayback old horse with a moth-eaten saddle, stirrups from two different sets, a bad hip, swollen glands, lockjaw, leg ulcers, bedsores, arthritis, jaundice, a hernia, hives, worms, cancer, a mossy overbite, and post-nasal drip. He’s knock-kneed too.”
The horse’s tack is also old and shoddy…
“…a half-cheek’d bit, and a head-stall of sheep’s leather which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots; one girth six times piec’d, and a woman’s crupper of velure, which hath two letters for her name fairly set down in studs, and here and there piec’d with pack-thread.”
Elizabethan audiences understood all this terminology and could picture this poor horse and its gear. (You wouldn’t want to bring a horse this sick on stage!) It’s an indication of how important horses were as a means of transportation and indication of wealth that Petruchio has found himself the worst horse in Mantua to ride to his wedding. It’s part of his non-PC plan to “tame” Katherine’s shrewish nature by posing as the worst-dressed, worst-mounted bridegroom ever.
Correction: that should be Padua, not Mantua.
Haha Louise, that’s brilliant; well, to be more precise, Shakespeare’s brilliant (you’re pretty darned smart, too!).
Sadly, horses are still prone to may of those afflictions – growing up in Pony Club, we had to learn about lampas (swollen upper palate) and windgalls (swollen fetlocks/ankles – not overly serious), and we still need to regularly de-worm the horses for bots, which are plentiful around here in the fall.
Yes, horses were definitely an integral part of society and were apparently the singular factor in the rapid spread of Western civilization. It was so important that they stay healthy, even if it was just purely for economic reasons.
Fascinating story. At first, I thought I was going to miss the cold hearted femmes fatales, seedy gamblers, petty criminals, wicked uncles and plucky gals called Ginger from previous episodes, but you drew me in!