Topic: Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer, MD (pronounced /ˈkraʊt.hæmər/; born March 13, 1950) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and political commentator, and physician. His weekly column appears in The Washington Post and is syndicated to more than 200 newspapers and media outlets. He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and The New Republic. He is also a weekly panelist on the PBS news program Inside Washington and a regular panelist on Fox News's Special Report with Bret Baier.

Krauthammer was born on March 13, 1950 in New York City. He was raised in Montreal, Quebec, where he attended Herzliah High School and McGill University and obtained an honors degree in political science and economics in 1970. He was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, 1970–1971. He later moved to the United States, where he attended Harvard Medical School. Suffering a paralyzing diving accident in his first year of medical school, he was hospitalized for a year, during which time he continued his medical studies. He graduated with his class, earning an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, and then began working as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. In October 1984, he became board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

From 1975–1978, Krauthammer was a Resident and then a Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. During this time he and a colleague identified a form of mania resulting from a concomitant medical illness, rather than a primary inherent disorder, which they named "secondary mania" and published a second important paper on the epidemiology of manic illness. The standard textbook for bipolar disease (Manic Depressive Illness by Goodwin and Jamison) contains twelve references to his work.