Background
Bernatz was born on April 18, 1921 in Decorah, Iowa, as one of four children of Frank and Martha (née Hanson) Bernatz, and he died on October 6, 2010, in Rochester, Minnesota.
Bernatz was born on April 18, 1921 in Decorah, Iowa, as one of four children of Frank and Martha (née Hanson) Bernatz, and he died on October 6, 2010, in Rochester, Minnesota.
Bernatz was educated in public schools in Decorah, and he entered the University of Iowa (UI) in 1939.
He was awarded the Doctor of Medicine in 1944 after being inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society. Bernatz immediately received a military commission as a Lieutenant J.G. (O2) in the United States. Navy Medical Corps, and he served overseas as a general medical officer in combat zones in the Pacific theater of operations. Bernatz returned to the United States after cessation of hostilities at the end of 1945 to continue his postgraduate medical education.
However, that experience was interrupted in 1952 when he was recalled to active duty in the Navy during the Korean Conflict.
Bernatz served an additional 24 months as a naval surgeon in of Korea, completing his tour of duty in 1954 at the rank of Lieutenant Commander (O4). Following World World War II, Bernatz was accepted into the surgery residency program at the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota.
He went on to pursue subspecialty fellowship training in thoracic surgery, a field that was developing rapidly in the 1950s. Bernatz earned a Master of Science degree in that discipline from the University of Minnesota, and was appointed to the consulting staff at Mayo in 1955.
Bernatz rapidly acquired clinical experience with the treatment of thymoma, a potentially-aggressive mediastinal neoplasm which can be associated with myasthenia gravis and other paraneoplastic syndromes.
Together with Edward Harrison, a pathologist, and Oscar Clagett, another thoracic surgeon, Bernatz studied accrued clinicopathologic data from the management of more than 100 patients with thymoma. That information formed the substrate for creation of the first practical histopathologic categorization of thymoma in 1961, an approach that is still in use today as the "Bernatz classification." Additional studies were done throughout the next two decades on factors that influence the prognosis of patients with thymoma. Bernatz was married twice.
He is buried in Rochester, Minnesota.
Bernatz received his Bachelor of Arts degree as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1942, and was then enrolled in an accelerated wartime medical school curriculum at UI.