as a young man, charles is really conflicted about which way his life is going to go. he goes to oxford to study philosophy. but determines it s too esoteric. he goes to harvard medical school. he really was straddlingg those two disciplines. look what he chooses in his medical specialty. charles: i studied politics r and philosophy before. and i had this feeling this is too abstract. i should be doing something serious with my life, you know, a kind of real job in the real world with real facts. not hoity-toity ideas. and terms that nobody understoo understood. not of this airy fairy d stuff. get real with life. i decided to go to medical school. but i wanted to do something that i thought would be sophisticated and intellectual and in some ways abstract. i was looking for something halfway between the reality of medicine and the elegance, if you like, of philosophy. so psychiatry was the obvious thing. i was lucky because it was probably the easiest branch of medicine for me to do