Lessons of History in Veterinary Medicine

Abstract

The future of veterinary medicine is best understood in the context of history. What began as a profession rooted in urban centers in proximity to horses, physicians, and medical schools, was transformed into a land grant–based agricultural profession with the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the early twentieth century. Most of the United States' current veterinary colleges are still located in towns or small cities in the middle section of the country, outside the largest metropolitan areas where most veterinarians practice companion-animal medicine. Throughout veterinarian history, substantial numbers of US students have been educated in foreign colleges and this continues today, creating an even greater geographic imbalance between the veterinary educational process and US population centers and major medical schools. Three themes deserve special attention as we celebrate the profession's 150th anniversary. We must first move beyond the land-grant culture and develop a more geographically balanced approach to establishing new veterinary colleges that are also in closer association with schools of medicine and public health. We must also facilitate more opportunities for women leadership in organized veterinary medicine, in practice ownership, in academia, and in the corporate structures that educate, hire, and interface with veterinarians. Finally, we need to expand our understanding of One Health to include the concept of zooeyia (the role of animals in promoting human health), as well as continue to emphasize veterinarians' special roles in the control and management of zoonotic diseases and in advancing comparative medicine in the age of the genome.