There is a word in Urdu and Persian for a horse doctor. It is not a word. It is a man’s name, worn smooth by two thousand years of people shouting it across a stable yard
A horse has gone down in the lines. It will not put weight on the near foreleg and it has not eaten since yesterday. Somebody is sent running.
Fetch the salotri, they say, and a man comes with a bag.
Open Platts’s old dictionary of Urdu and classical Hindi and there it is, listed like any other trade: salotri, a farrier, a horse-doctor. Nobody shouting for one has thought about where the word came from in a very long time.
It is a name. There was a man called Shalihotra, and his name became the job.
Horses did not thrive in the subcontinent. The climate was against them, the grazing was against them, and the breeding stock degenerated within a generation or two. Every serious cavalry in Indian history therefore ran on imported animals, brought down the passes from Central Asia or shipped in from Arabia at enormous cost, and then kept alive by hand.
An army’s horses were the most expensive and the most fragile property a king owned. Lose them to colic, to worms, to a bad hoof, to whatever went through the lines in a wet season, and the campaign was over without a battle.
Somebody was always going to write that book. It was only a question of who.
The Shalihotra Samhita is a working manual. It moves through the anatomy of the horse, the classification of its diseases, their treatment, and surgery, and it is unsentimental throughout.
It tells you how to read the animal in front of you: the coat, the eye, the way it stands, the way it takes its feed. It tells you how to judge age from the teeth. It sorts breeds by build and by temperament, which is practical rather than poetic, because a king buying two hundred animals needs a way to tell what he is buying.
There are chapters on wounds, on parasites, on fevers, on the conditions of the gut, on eye operations. An eighteenth-century illustrated copy of the text shows a man operating on a horse’s eye, the animal held, the instruments laid out, the whole scene as matter-of-fact as a page from a repair manual.
On campaign
The Arthashastra, which is nothing if not practical, gives the superintendent of horses his own chapter. Rations by weight. Stable dimensions. Grooms, their duties, their penalties. Animals examined before they are accepted into the stables and treated when they are sick.
Veterinary men went out with armies. A war horse that could be got back on its feet in three days was worth more than the man riding it, in the plain arithmetic of what each had cost to acquire, and everybody involved knew it.
Then there is the second of Ashoka’s rock edicts, cut into stone in the third century BC and still legible.
It says that throughout his dominions, and in the lands beyond them, medical treatment has been provided of two kinds: treatment for people, and treatment for animals. Where medicinal herbs and roots and fruits were missing, he says, they were brought in and planted, for both.
An emperor listing his achievements in stone put the treatment of animals in the same sentence as the treatment of his subjects, and did not feel the need to explain why.
How the name travelled
The text went where the horses came from. It was rendered into Persian, into Arabic, into Tibetan, and later authors wrote their own veterinary works under his name or built directly on his.
By the time the Delhi sultans were commissioning Persian manuals on the horse, the man had stopped being an author and become a category. A salihotriya was a person who did this work. Then salihotriya wore down to salotri, and salotri went into the dictionaries, and the dictionaries kept it after everyone had forgotten there was a person at the bottom of it.
What we do not know
Almost everything about him. He is said to have been the son of a sage called Hayagosha and to have lived at Sravasti, and other accounts put him elsewhere entirely. The dates offered run from the third century BC to more than two thousand years earlier, and the earlier ones are not worth much.
The text itself is not one man’s either. Like every long-lived Indian technical work it was added to, rearranged and recopied, and the figure of twelve thousand verses that gets quoted is a traditional number rather than a count.
He left no life. He left a job, and his name on it, which is more than most authors manage.
Who is known as the Father of Veterinary Medicine?
Sage Shalihotra, an ancient Indian scholar who lived in the 3rd Century BCE, is recognized as the Father of Veterinary Medicine.
What is the most famous book written by Shalihotra?
His most famous work is the Shalihotra Samhita, also known as the Hayayurveda, which focuses on the health and care of horses.
Where was Shalihotra from?
He was from the ancient city of Shravasti, located in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India.
Did Shalihotra perform surgeries?
Yes, he was a pioneer in ancient Indian surgery, performing operations for fractures, cataracts, and internal obstructions in animals.
How did Shalihotra’s work reach other countries?
His texts were translated into Arabic and Persian during the medieval period, spreading Indian veterinary knowledge to the Middle East and eventually Europe.
Sources & References
John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884) — the entry for salotri as a farrier or horse-doctor.
Ashoka, Rock Edict II, in E. Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Volume I (1925) — the provision of medical treatment and medicinal plants for people and for animals.
Kautilya’s Arthashastra, translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford University Press, 2013) — the superintendent of horses, stable management and the care of army animals.
G. Jan Meulenbeld, A History of Indian Medical Literature (Egbert Forsten) — the Shalihotra literature, its manuscripts, its later recensions and the problem of dating it.
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