If I am sensitive, I will perish. What is, is. Everything has happened. Everything is over.

In my youth, after my father had carried out his educational experiments on me, I worshipped objective knowledge in the form of natural science and subjective enjoyment of life in the form of money. Money was more than a superficial pleasure–it seemed to me the only and therefore the best substitute for God in our otherwise faithless time. Money is the ground beneath one’s feet. He who has money at least has something. He is standing on the securest foundation there is in the contemporary world order.

To know and to possess as much as possible–such a simple recipe, and yet so difficult to follow! How devotedly I toiled, in my heart always disinterested, cold, and isolated, in the service of these two gods, spending my nights in experimental bacteriological facilities and pathology laboratories or at the gaming table–and in both my endeavors I had luck. With the help of my winnings, I carried out the most extravagant experiments (chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys are incredibly expensive). I sought distraction in work when I was tired of gambling, and sought distraction in gambling when I no longer had the drive and concentration necessary for intellectual work. At the green baccarat table, I had new ideas for scientific experiments. My fortunes were happy, but I was seldom happy myself.

I lost my mother early. My siblings, one brother, one sister, were strangers to me. My father played a central but calamitous role in my life; we could not be friends.

Though I had long since become weary of my way of life, I refused a chair at a small university. I had no interest in teaching. I did publish the results of my bacteriological experiments, which threw light on an interesting rare disease, rat-bite fever, but for the time being I was not pursuing them. I had won a fairly large amount at gambling. I locked my door and traveled. I met my future wife. She was very well-to-do, unbeautiful, no longer young. Thoughts of financial gain were far from my mind at first. There was nothing about community of property in our marriage contract, which we drafted one heavenly morning beneath palms and fruit-laden orange trees. And there was (and still is) a daughter from my wife’s first marriage; she was her legal heir and would soon be of marriageable age. Looking out over the azure sea, we discussed our future ménage. Far too many rooms, but only the one (shared) bedroom. A luxurious household, whose upkeep would come from my wife’s interest earnings and my income as a physician, contributed on an equal basis.

I had completely forgotten that I was not only a researcher but also a credentialed, qualified physician. And I was a good diagnostician, even if I knew human diseases and physical abnormalities more from the lecture hall, from the dissection table, and from the microscope than from bedside clinical observation. Modern scientific analytical methods–X-ray examination, chemical analysis, biological-function testing–are so well developed now that these accurate tests are an ample substitute for bedside experience.

I also had adequate manual skills from my experiments. Vivisection experiments, experiments on living material, cannot be performed without a certain degree of surgical skill. The laws of asepsis, the secret of all surgical practice, are also applicable here.

More than anything else, I had a certain interest in surgery and gynecology, an interest that deepened when I spent some months working as a volunteer at a large clinic following my return.