Today begins a new excerpt from the book Equine ER about a mare with pleural pneumonia and the equine vet determined to do everything possible to save her. But before we delve into the story of Slewpy’s Star, we’re going to first visit some background to her tale.

Medicine, human or veterinary, is a science that evolves, and that evolution is based on preparation, experimentation, dreams, and accidents, and the whims of men and women, and even of nature. Blizzards in Colorado in the winters of 1949 and 1950 resulted in numerous range bulls getting frostbitten scrotums. Because of that, Colorado State University’s veterinary school ended up creating new techniques to gauge bulls’ fertility É which resulted years later in the Society for Theriogenology (veterinary reproduction).

The first human heart catheterization was performed in 1929 by a young German surgical resident on himself; he defied his boss’s orders not to perform the dangerous experiment. It was prompted by the resident’s fascination with a 65-year-old picture of a horse with a catheter in its heart, an experiment by two Frenchmen, a veterinarian and a physiologist. 

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