Abstract

Foot-and-mouth disease was the event which led to the increased and improved training of veterinarians able to produce through their research new veterinary knowledge for practical application.It led to the transformation of the Mexican veterinary profession. It changed the kind of knowledge veterinarians received at university, and it also changed the work they did as professionals. Veterinarians gradually began to perform a much wider range of tasks: they did research, taught, worked as civil servants, or assumed positions as academic administrators and as high governmental officials with a large amount of influence on governmental agricultural activities. They also engaged directly in animal husbandry and in food production.In parallel with these changes, the National University, and within it the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry, underwent a concomitant series of changes which ran hand-in-hand with the growth of the Mexican state. The university provided training for specialised research workers by offering scholarships and programmes of graduate study. This consolidated the activities of an academic community working on applied veterinary medicine. The beneficiaries of these efforts take part in and influence, to varying degrees, the planning and programming of agricultural policies in a way that would not formerly have been possible