"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

himself!
So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to them and I
say, "Yeah ­­ there's that guy, and that guy over there looking at us." Of course, when I'm
turned around and pointing like that, other guys start to look at us, so I say, "Now him,
and those two over there ­­ and now the whole bunch." He still doesn't look up to check.
He's busy writing more things on my paper.
Then he says, "Do you ever hear voices in your head?"
"Very rarely," and I'm about to describe the two occasions on which it happened
when he says, "Do you talk to yourself?"
"Yeah, sometimes when I'm shaving, or thinking; once in a while." He's writing
down more stuff.
"I see you have a deceased wife ­­ do you talk to her?"
This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said, "Sometimes,
when I go up on a mountain and I'm thinking about her."
More writing. Then he asks, "Is anyone in your family in a mental institution?"
"Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum."
"Why do you call it an insane asylum?" he says, resentfully. "Why don't you call
it a mental institution?"
"I thought it was the same thing."
"Just what do you think insanity is?" he says, angrily.
"It's a strange and peculiar disease in human beings," I say honestly.
"There's nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than appendicitis!" he
retorts.
"I don't think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and something
about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it's much more complicated and myste­
rious." I won't go through the whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is
physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was socially peculiar.
Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist, I had
nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to put out my hands,
I couldn't resist pulling a trick a guy in the "bloodsucking line" had told me about. I
figured nobody was ever going to get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway
under water, I would do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one
down.
The psychiatrist doesn't notice. He says, "Turn them over."
I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was down goes
up, and he still doesn't notice, because he's always looking very closely at one hand to see
if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.
Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again. He lights up
and says, "I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?"
"MIT and Princeton. And where did you study?"
"Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?"
"Physics. And what did you study?"
"Medicine."
"And this is medicine?"
"Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and wait a
few minutes!"