From Wikipedia:

Krauthammer was born on March 13, 1950, in New York City and raised in Montreal. "My father was a naturalized French citizen. He lived in France most of his life and moved to the United States after the war and got involved in real estate. A friend of his took him on a business trip to Montreal and he was enchanted by the idea of living in a place where French was spoken" . His parents were Orthodox and he went to a Hebrew day school. "I got a rigorous Jewish education. I know what it is to be a Jew. There's a difference between being nominally Jewish or sentimentally Jewish and being grounded in Jewish learning".

In 1970, he graduated from McGill University with First Class Honors in political science and economics. The following year, he was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to the United States and entering Harvard Medical School. During Krauthammer's first year of medical school, he was paralyzed in a diving-board accident and was hospitalized for 14 months. He has been confined to a wheelchair ever since the accident. He continued his medical studies at Harvard, however, and graduated with his class, earning his M.D. in 1975. From 1975 to 1978, Krauthammer was a resident and then a chief resident in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1984, he became board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. During his time as chief resident, he discovered a variant of manic depressive disease which he called "Secondary Mania". He also co-authored the path-finding study on the epidemiology of mania.
http:/en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Charles_Krauthammer.
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He was on his back in a hospital bed and had people from Harvard come in and project medical texts overhead and that's how he studied.
Part of the way he looks resulted from the diving board accident.