FEATURE 12
THE HACKELS’
BIG HEART
by DAVID HOWELL, MD PHD
Army Medical Corps. He completed pathology residency at Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) School of Medicine in Cleveland, and subsequently joined the faculty there, working with Dr. Thomas Kinney, then Chief of Pathology. When Dr. Kinney came to Duke as the second chair of the Department of Pathology, he recruited Dr. Hackel as Professor of Pathology in 1960. Dr. Hackel became Professor Emeritus in 1989, but continued to be active in the department for several more years.
For much of the past year, the Department of Pathology has been celebrating the lives and contributions of Dr. Donald Hackel and his wife, Irene Hackel. Dr. Hackel died in 1994, and Mrs. Hackel passed away on August 18, 2020, but the couple left a major legacy founded on his research and teaching, her support of Medical Center philanthropy, and their joint contribution to a fellowship for Duke medical students: the Donald B. Hackel Fellowship in Cardiovascular Pathology. (The Fellowship bears Dr. Hackel’s name, but is clearly intended by his family to honor both members of the pair.) Donald Hackel hailed from Boston. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard before interning at Beth Israel Hospital, where he met Irene; he then served in the U.S.
Dr. Hackel is best known in the scientific community for his foundational work on cardiac ischemia, but he is perhaps best remembered by his students for his enthusiastic teaching, particularly in small group or one-on-one settings, always bestowed with patience, kindness, and a wry sense of humor. Several current Pathology faculty members recall him spending hours demonstrating the dissection of tiny pediatric hearts with congenital disorders. He continued to participate in “heart cutting” late in his career, when Parkinson disease robbed him of much of his manual dexterity. He typically used an Olympic-sabre-size knife; trainees looked on with concern, but there’s no record of him ever cutting himself. He never tired of teaching, even if it involved repeating the same lesson for a new audience. He was particularly revered by medical students, who honored him with three Golden Apple Awards for excellence as an educator, followed by a Lifetime Golden Apple near the end of his career. (Winners of this award aren’t eligible for consideration for the next five years, so he basically won it each time his name was on the ballot.) He also received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Duke Medical Alumni Association in 1989. For all his prowess as a communicator, Dr. Hackel was a gentle, unassuming man who almost never expressed overt disgruntlement. When a promising trainee indicated, during examination of a heart, that he was going into surgery rather than pathology, his response was a smile, a sigh, and a
