Founding Member Department of Surgery
Before The University of New Mexico School of Medicine was founded in 1964, private practice neurosurgeons would staff the Bernalillo County Indian Hospital and travel to rural towns in New Mexico with a packet of instruments to conduct surgical procedures.
They treated a wide variety of problems, including spinal tuberculosis and frequent pituitary tumors. But the groundwork laid by founding faculty, like that of Michael Pollay, MD, enabled the school to develop into the institution able to provide deep resources for surgical education and community health known throughout the country today.
Pollay completed his medical doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1955 and surgical education at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, where he ultimately became the chief resident in neurosurgery. By 1963, he was recruited to Albuquerque to serve as an instructor and to help establish the new medical school.
At the time of his arrival in New Mexico, there was no UNM Health Sciences campus. Pollay and other founding faculty members worked out of the Indian Hospital, and early anatomy labs for the school were set up in a nearby abandoned 7-Up bottling plant.
Pollay developed an intense clinical service in Albuquerque before there was an intensive care unit or trauma center. He and Ralph Kaplan, MD, assisted by a surgical or orthopedic resident, shared every other night call. Pollay also conducted research and developed a laboratory to study cerebralspinal fluid physiology. While on the faculty he helped to develop the curriculum and training programs for the new medical school. Eventually, Pollay rose to professor of Neurosurgery and Physiology.
In 1976, he left the UNM School of Medicine to join the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine faculty as professor and chair of Neurosurgery, a position he held until 1994.
Pollay derived the greatest joy in his professional and scientific career from his role as a teacher of the many students, interns, residents and fellows with whom he worked. Even after his departure from UNM, he and his wife Peggy, a retired nurse, established an endowed scholarship through the La Tierra Sagrada Society, a group formed to support the financial needs of medical students.
Pollay passed away after a lengthy respiratory illness in February 2021. His expertise and passion for education, as well as his service to the people of New Mexico, are greatly appreciated and fondly remembered. You can submit remembrances and learn more about his life and career in neurosurgery at the UNM School of Medicine’s Virtual Faculty Memorial webpage
