In the nineteen twenties a group of graduates from the Colegio de San Nicolás and the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán, drafted a program for the economic and social development of the countryside that, in the next decade, influenced federal policies and ideas about health care. This article examines the ideas and efforts of two Morelian physicians, Jesús Díaz Barriga (1891-1971) and Enrique Arreguín Vélez (1907-1989) who, during the 1920s and early 1930s, developed an incipient system of rural health in Michoacán. In 1935 they organized the First Congreso of Rural Hygiene, an event which they hoped would launch a state-managed system of rural health, and eventually the socialization of medicine in Mexico.