The Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) is an institution that represents more than 87 years of growth from a small school of veterinary medicine in 1916 to its present role as a major veterinary educational, medical and research center. Through years of maturation and expansion, an institution emerged that has proudly produced approximately 10 percent of the nation's practicing veterinarians and continues to lead the nation in innovative approaches to veterinary medical education.
The first attempt to teach veterinary science at the Agricultural & Mechanical College (as Texas A&M University was called) was made in the third session of the college in 1878-79 when the college surgeon, D. Port Smythe, M.D., was also listed on the faculty as professor of anatomy, physiology and hygiene. No course is described, however, and no further record is available to indicate that such a course was actually given. It is assumed that the proposed lectures would concern our domestic animals, for this thought is clearly expressed in the catalog of the fourth session. In April 1888, the college received a state appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars for equipping and operating its Department of Veterinary Science, and on June 6, 1888, Dr. Mark Francis received his formal appointment to the faculty. This marked the real beginning of professional veterinary medicine in Texas; Francis was the first trained veterinarian at the college and was destined to become one of the most distinguished men in United States veterinary medicine.
Francis recalled:
It was the latter part of July or the first of August when I arrived at College Station. The college work at first was merely some classroom lectures to the agricultural students. There were no laboratories or equipment for this work. We had a room about 14 x 16 feet that was on the ground floor of the Main Building (destroyed by fire in May 1912) that served as office, classroom and laboratory. At the end of the school year-June 1889-the adjoining room became vacant and was assigned to us as a classroom. In this unsuitable place we toiled for 15 years. There was no hospital. Along about December 1888 a frame barn was built to serve this purpose. It was about 20 x 36 feet and was near where the Agriculture Building now stands .... The following year a frame building was provided that served as a dissecting room.
It was Mark Francis, working under these conditions, who helped prove that the tick was the culprit causing Texas cattle fever. He developed effective inoculations for the fever that had plagued Southern livestock since the late 1700s.
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