Sarah Tucker, MD

Sarah Tucker, MD is a 2016 graduate of the Medical Humanities Program at Baylor and a 2020 graduate of the Baylor College of Medicine. She is a pediatric resident at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, part of the Northwestern University Medical Center. Her husband, Andrew Gustafson is an internal medicine resident at Feinberg, the adult hospital of Northwestern.

"Death is not the enemy of medicine." -Sarah Tucker, MD

Sarah says that the Medical Humanities Program really prepared her to grapple with the many things in medicine that aren’t science. One example of that, she says, is that medical humanities “Gave me a space to think about death and understand how that is going to affect me when patients die. Death is not the enemy of medicine. Already, I have had several deaths—some were the best possible of circumstances and some were not. I never had an idea how emotionally taxing it would be to watch children die. If I had not done medical humanities, I would have been blindsided by this.”

Because Medical Humanities is a B.A. degree, Sarah was required to take Introduction to Art History. “I was pretty annoyed at first,” she says. “But as it turns out, it was one of my favorite classes because it taught me to observe in different ways.” Digging deeply into details is the substance of art history, or medical humanities, and of taking care of patients.