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—Richard P. Feynman

What we hope to get out of taking care of patients is a glimpse of a transcendent moment.

I believed that I was a bright enough, hardworking, idealistic kid who was good at math and science, who, if it hadn’t been for Vietnam and the sixties and mental illness … if I hadn’t been called upon to save too tough a world at too tender an age … maybe I should have been a doctor.

It was not reasonable for a twenty-eight-year-old with a 1.8 undergraduate math and science grade-point average, recently off heavy meds, to think he might be able to go to medical school, but there’s something about manic depression that, if you’re lucky, gives you a contagious optimism. I believed I should be a doctor, and people who met me back then, especially if they were interviewing me, came to think so too. Sooner or later a medical school had to admit someone six years off the beaten track, with three psychotic breaks and a 1.8 undergraduate math and science GPA. Maybe I’d be the guy.

By the time I actually applied to medical school, I had put together two and a half years of straight A’s at UMass Boston and had published a few articles in Harper’s and The Village Voice. And I was working on a book that I thought was going well. Attitude was creating reality.

When I applied to medical school, no one asked me if I thought I was going to go crazy again. It was a more polite time. The questions I was asked were vague enough that I could have gotten out of talking about mental illness altogether, but how and why I came to be applying to medical school at the advanced age of twenty-eight didn’t make much sense without it. My grades at Swarthmore weren’t very good; my MCAT scores were good, but a ton of applicants had good MCAT scores. My only real distinction and accomplishment was having published a few articles, and they were about mental illness. “Why I Want to Bite R. D. Laing” was a seminal piece of work. Without being mentally ill, I was just another overaged, mediocre applicant. I had to project some strength that would make up for the fact that I’d have six years’ less time to take care of patients than most applicants.

Somehow, some way, the insightful, providentially wise admissions committee of the day offered me a place in the Harvard Medical School class of ’79. I was three years off of Thorazine. It had been almost four years exactly since I was hospitalized. Getting into medical school tied up my having been mentally ill with a big red bow.

He went crazy. He’s the son of Godzilla.

Yeah, but he went to medical school.

Which one?

Harvard Medical School is five white-marble buildings surrounding a quadrangle of grass and walks. When the building in the Back Bay down near Mass General became too small, Harvard sent a delegation with plans to talk with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who looked the plans over and reportedly wrote out a $13 million check on the spot, saying, “Good meeting you, gentlemen. I believe that should cover it.” So they named the dorm, which is also built out of white marble, after him. Vanderbilt Hall.

Seen from Longwood Avenue, Building A looks a lot like the Parthenon. There aren’t any other buildings in the neighborhood that look like the Parthenon. There’s a tree off to the side that was grown from a cutting from the tree on the island of Kos under which Hippocrates taught his students. Hippocrates gave us the famous oath that contains the admonition “First, do no harm.”

The quadrangle was built in 1906. There were no antibiotics then. Surgery had to be very quick and was as likely to kill you as cure you. Keeping germs out of the surgical field was a novel idea. There were 155 medical schools in the United States, most of which were run for profit by one or two doctors, like trade schools. There were no admission requirements. If your family could pay, you could be a doctor. Doctors were taught and trained without being exposed to patients or science. The chances of any given patient being helped by any given doctor were slim. Most were