H. Herbert Hahn, II M.D.

Visitation will be Friday, February 17, 2023, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at Scanio-Harper Funeral Home, 3110 Airport Road, Temple, TX 76504. The family encourages a lively exchange of stories about Dr Hahn.

Herb was born on March 19, 1934, in Kirkwood, Missouri, to Herman Herbert Hahn and Blanche van Alyea Hahn. His family moved to Texas when he was a young boy. He attended Port Isabel Elementary School and graduated from Harlingen High School in 1951. He completed his pre-med at Rice Institute in 1954 and graduated from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 1958.

Dr Hahn did his internship at Philadelphia General Hospital and then served as a captain and general medical officer in the United States Air Force. Captain Hahn was stationed at Naha Air Force Base on Okinawa. He learned to speak Japanese and flitted around Asia, embracing the culture, history, and natural beauty.

Following his stint in the USAF, Dr Hahn did a year of general surgery residency at the Robert B. Green Hospital in San Antonio. While in San Antonio, he met his future wife Eva Riha, a native of the former Czechoslovakia, on a blind date.

In 1962, Dr Hahn joined the U.S. Foreign Service. He served as an embassy physician first in Mogadishu, Somalia, and then in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A year later, while stationed in Phnom Penh, he married Eva, who was still in San Antonio, over the telephone and by proxy. Their anniversary date(s) span the International Date Line.

Eva soon joined him in Cambodia, where they lived in a house on stilts and had parrots and a civet, among other pets. When the American Embassy staff were expelled from Cambodia during the Vietnam Conflict, Foreign Service Officer Hahn transferred to West Africa.

Dr Hahn was then stationed in Accra, Ghana (he and Eva lived in another house on stilts). He regularly flew to six neighboring countries to treat patients in the American embassies there. In Africa, Dr Hahn encountered and successfully treated a plethora of unusual, often-fatal infectious diseases that required extensive knowledge to diagnose and treat.

With his newfound understanding of communicable diseases, Dr Hahn accepted and completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Washington in Seattle, followed by a research fellowship in infectious disease under Dr. Bob Petersdorf. He spent five years in Seattle in academic medicine – while also hunting and fishing in the beautiful American Northwest.

Dr Hahn’s first “real” job was as a general internist at Outlar-Blair Clinic in Wharton, Texas. After one year there, he joined Scott & White in Temple, Texas, as a specialist in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He served as the hospital epidemiologist and established the infection control system long used by Scott & White.

He also served on the S&W Medicine Residency Committee and developed a method for testing residents that was later adopted by the American Board of Internal Medicine. Further, he was on the S&W Medical School Committee and put together the Internal Medicine curriculum for the Texas A&M School of Medicine. He will be remembered for his penmanship, clipboard, and never-ending list making.

Dr Hahn was an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. Dr Hahn also served as president of the Bell County Medical Society and was a delegate to the Texas Medical Association.

In 1976, Dr Hahn was a member of the Texas delegation to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that put Ronald Reagan on the national political scene. He was proud of being a grass-roots member of the Reagan Revolution.

In addition to his life in medicine, Dr Hahn was an avid outdoorsman, regularly taking his children and grandchildren camping, fishing, boating, target shooting, and hunting. He was proud of his lifetime Texas Parks & Wildlife license.

He also was a lifelong learner. When he wasn’t poring through the JAMA or the NEJM, he was reading and annotating histories or political journals or Wall Street Journal editorials, discussing what he learned every night at the dinner table, the family classroom. He was especially proud of his four children.

Dr Hahn worked at Scott & White as part of the infectious disease triumvirate of Howard, Hahn, and Hurley for 20 years. He retired from medicine in 1989 and began a full-time job as farmer, rancher, and cedar-clearer at Hard Scrabble Ranch in West Bell County.

Dr. Hahn was a proud American, a fiercely independent Texan, and above all else valued family. He leaves behind a large and growing number of descendants who share his loyalty to family, his belief in personal freedom, and a respect and admiration for our natural world.

Dr Hahn is preceded in death by his parents and his sister Carol Hahn.

He is survived by his wife of 59 years and his four children – Carla and husband J. Mark Clardy of Temple; Christopher and wife Sarah of Round Rock; Catherine and husband Michael Prochko of Dayton, Maryland; and Steven and wife Julie of Edmond, Oklahoma.

He is also survived by 15 grandchildren – Anna-Maria, Eve Elise, Herbert Alexander, Benjamin, and James Clardy; Reagan, Rachel, and August Hahn; Austin and wife Michelle, Veronika, Travis, and Gabriel Prochko; and Hudson, Landon, and Colin Hahn; as well two great-grandchildren – Aleksander and Nathaniel Prochko.

Memorials may be made to Shriner’s Children’s Hospital Texas, 2900 North Rocky Point Drive, Tampa, FL 33607 or donate.lovetotherescue.org; Texas State Rifle Association, 944 Highway 71 East, Bastrop, TX 78602 or tsra.com/contributions/; or McLane’s Children’s Hospital at BSW CTX Foundation, 2401 South 31st Street, MS 20, S103, Temple TX 76508; please mention it’s a memorial in the name of Dr H. Herbert Hahn II.