William Tucker, M.D. William Tucker, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has been teaching psychiatry and the humanistic aspects of medicine to psychiatric residents, medical students learning internal medicine, and interested colleagues, for the past 30 years.
The Yale Journal for Humanities <br>A psychiatrist in New York with an MA in comparative literature from Yale, Dr. William Tucker has given us a fascinating book in which he takes a number of well-known short stories as case material for analysis, relying on Erikson's eight stages of life as a model of normal development. That strait-jacket does not confine his exercise, nor his purpose to carry narrative, now transplanted to the medical canon, back to where it started. He analyzes classic stories - or more properly their protagonists - as if they were patients. <br>In his foreward, the author writes, I stumbled upon short stories as a form of poetry....patients began to seem to me like characters in a handful of these stories, which were applicable to one clinical situation after another. I started teaching these stories to residents and colleagues as if they were clinical cases. Later, I began to offer them to patients as ways of looking at their own experiences. <br>One