of it in hospitals in a satisfactory human suffering, and if you are some hot shot kid from harvard, it beats the callousness out of you in the sense that you are the master of the world and it humbles you in many ways. it makes you appreciate human life. it makes everything you write about and talk about less abstract. here i was approaching the last year of my residency. and i thought i don't really want to continue to do this. i liked what i did. i was okay at what i did. i did research. but my heart wasn't in it and i felt there was a world happening out there, outside the hospital walls but there was no way to get from here to there. and pure, shear blind certain diserendipitous luck. one of the professors at harvard i had written a paper on bipolar disease. out of the blue i got appointed by jimmy carter national institutes of health. the second i heard about it i went right to his office,