I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

Jaspers frames his entry into medicine as motivated less by vocational ambition than by an epistemic and anthropological hunger: to know “facts” and to know “man.” The pairing signals a lifelong tension in his work between empirical investigation and the irreducible complexity of human existence. His emphasis on “disciplined work” and being “tied” to laboratory and clinic underscores a formative commitment to method, observation, and professional rigor—commitments that later informed his approach to psychopathology and, eventually, his philosophical insistence that objective knowledge has limits when confronting subjectivity, freedom, and meaning. The quote thus reads as a self-portrait of a thinker whose philosophical concerns grew out of clinical and scientific training.