I read somewhere a while back that veterinary medicine as a whole went wayyyyy down once horses were replaced by cars for transportation.
Found it: http://animalpetdoctor.homestead.com/history2.html
Not sure how reliable the source is. Here's the pertinent part:
"Starting in the 1890's, humane societies rejoiced that electric street cars were ending the cruel drudgery that was the lot of the street car horse. By 1907, animal powered street cars, stagecoaches, and omnibuses had almost ceased to exist in American cities. Even with the high demand for horses in World War 1, the horse industry collasped and unwanted horses in the hundreds of thousands were yearly slaughtered for glue and leather. The slaughter continued throughout the 1920's, with much of the meat being used for the new industry of canned dog food.
The vast majority of turn of the century veterinarians were really horse doctors with minimal training in food animals or pets ...there wasn't much demand.
Anyhow, the collaspe of the horse industry followed by a severe depression in farming in the 1920's followed by the general depression of the 1930's almost wiped out our fledging profession. Indeed, almost all private and many new State veterinary schools or programs...including the one at Harvard and in my own state of South Carolina... closed down or never succeeded in getting fully started.
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Between 1914 and 1924, the total number of veterinary students fall by 75%! In 1921, the 29 surviving veterinary schools graduated a total of about 275 new veterinarians. (For you yankees, that's less than 10 each)".
