Retirement for Dr. Lou Bernhardt hasn’t been at all a cessation of work. It was merely a pivot to something else.
The former Dean Clinic cardiothoracic surgeon stopped seeing patients in 2004 but refocused his passion for medicine to teaching ensuing generations of physicians at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Bernhardt, a Milwaukee native whose family lived for a time in Chicago during his childhood, graduated from Oberlin College, then the UW medical school in 1963. After graduation, an internship and surgical residency, and before joining Dean in 1971, Bernhardt was an assistant dean at the medical school for about a year.
“Since I’ve returned to the medical school, I’ve given lectures. I have taught in groups,” he said. “I have mentored individual students, some with remedial needs and others who may have shown exceptional promise. So teaching is trying to impart knowledge. Sometimes prodding, sometimes asking questions that they have to think about.”
Bernhardt, 82, has also been a mentor in the Chancellor’s Scholarship Program for the past 12 years. And he’s been active with Agrace, the nonprofit hospice founded in Madison in 1978. He serves on its board of directors, and despite a self-described handicap that he “never, quote, soared with the social eagles,” Bernhardt has helped Agrace raise millions of dollars. He’s also an Agrace “ambassador,” giving tours to families before a loved one becomes an inpatient.
Bernhardt also volunteers with the Benevolent Specialist Project free clinic, which helps uninsured people connect with medical specialists.
When Bernhardt was a boy, his parents sent him to Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. There he befriended the school’s only female student, who was having difficulty making friends. That was Chris Welles, the daughter of famed Wisconsin native and filmmaker Orson Welles, who had also attended Todd as a boy. About 10 years ago, Bernhardt’s kindness was recalled in Chris Welles’ book about growing up with her famous father, and before it was published she and Bernhardt re-connected by telephone.
“She said, ‘Are you the little chubby boy who befriended me?” Bernhardt recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Bernhardt had a three-hour lunch with Welles in New York, “and since that time we’ve stayed in touch, and I have visited her.”
It’s kind of neat to have a relationship with somebody going back that far, someone whose life you probably made infinitely better.
People ask me why I don’t go South in the winter or am not a snowbird. Two reasons: One, I love to teach. And two, you can’t make old friends.
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