Chapter 9: Big Enough to Stay Small
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“How Well Medicine Was Practiced” Bright young physicians flooded into the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Physicians of that era almost all had a service obligation to the military,” Barr explained. “There were many physicians exposed to Albuquerque by their service obligation, either in New Mexico or in this part of the country. They were young physicians, they were specialists, they were well trained. They recruited into their practice groups colleagues from residency programs around the country, literally from the East to the West Coast.” Albuquerque was blessed by the fact that it had both an Air Force base and an Army post at the time. New Mexico had public health service facilities sprinkled around the state, and it had other defense installations, such as White Sands Missile Range at Alamogordo. The merger of Kirtland, Manzano, and Sandia Air Force bases in 1971 created one of the largest Air Force installations in the Southwest,1 ensuring that dozens of young Air Force doctors would be getting out of the service every year in Albuquerque. Andrew Horvath was one of those young physicians who arrived in Albuquerque in the early 1970s, albeit not with the military. Horvath escaped from his native Hungary in the wake of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets; he went to college in Pennsylvania and medical school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Horvath did a surgical internship in Boston, spent two years in the Peace Corps, and did his residency training and fellowship in hematology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. In 1972, he decided to move west and arrived in Albuquerque.
Below: Pathologist Andrew Horvath,
MD, arrived in Albuquerque in the early 1970s and has been affiliated with Presbyterian ever since. Courtesy: Andrew Horvath, MD
1977
The city, Horvath recalled, “was on the verge of a growth spurt, and you could feel that this community was going to really evolve rapidly. It was very attractive because of the tricultural heritage
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