Human and veterinarian medicine were rarely much different, especially when you're talking about saving a favorite animal of someone who can have you summarily executed. ;-) You give it your best. Even today, they aren't separated. Many say that it's easier to get through med school than veterinarian college.

Horses and elephants were vital assets in the never-ending warfare of the ancient world. Physicians treating human beings were also trained in the care of animals. Ancient Indian medical treatises such as those of Charaka, Sushruta and Harita contain chapters or references about the care of diseased, as well as healthy, animals.

The main work of Shalihotra (c. 2350 BCE) was a

large treatise on the care and management of horses, the Shalihotra Samhita (encyclopedia of the physician Shalihotra) having some 12,000 shlokas in Sanskrit. It has been translated into Persian, Arabic, Tibetan and English languages. This work described equine and elephant anatomy, physiology, surgery and diseases with their curative and preventive measures. It elaborated on the body structures of different races of horses, and identified the structural details by which one can determine the age of a horse.

A very early book on the treatment of the diseases of animals was pressed into clay tablets in cuneiform Sumerian. Somehow it seems inevitable not only that the subject was horses, but that the author was a woman. I have not been able to track it down closer than a brief reference in a tertiary author.

The Kikkuli Text (c. 1350 BC) is an early text on horse training from Anatolia. Shortly after this "other texts on the same subject" were stored at Hattusa, and veterinary texts at Ugarit. The last were highly practical lists of symptoms with nostrums to apply, much in the pattern of medical texts.

The ancient Greek for a veterinarian was a hippiatrik, a horse doctor, and one named Chiron left us his Claudii Hermeri Mulomedicina Chironis. That his name is the same as the mythical healer who was a centaur seems too appropriate for accident: he undoubtedly borrowed it on purpose.

In the ancient world, we first come to actual veterinary practice with the husbandry of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (c. 60-65 CE), and Publius Vegetius Renatus. P. Vegetius should not be confused, though usually he is, with Flavius Vegetius Renatus who wrote the compilation of military practices from all down Roman history, mixed with wishful thinking, called Epitoma Rei Militaris, which has misled and confused military historians for ages. We try to ignore him. The Digestorum artis mulomedicine libri was written in the late 300s of the current era. Unlike practitioners before and after him, P. Vegetius has no truck with incantations, but is as scientific and materialistic as he can be.

Anne Charlotte Svinhufvud made a translation of an anonymous medieval work on the diseases of horses, inevitably paired with the points of the horse to check when buying one (A Late Middle English Treatise on Horses; Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1978). The surviving copy was likely enscribed between 1380 and 1420 in Berkshire: how old the original work was is always questionable in these cases, as this certainly doesn't seem the original. It may easily date back a hundred years earlier, the scribe just "modernizing" the Middle English to what he spoke. In this case, we have High Medieval veterinary practice.

Carlo Ruini's book Anatomia del Cavallo, (Anatomy of the Horse) was published in 1598. It was the first comprehensive treatise on the anatomy of a non-human species.

Many a book titled as being about riding or horsemanship may get down to veterinary matters, too, but as a sidelight.