Nine serious medical school students in lab coats gathered around a conference room table at 9:00am on a Friday to talk Seinfeld. Their faces turned toward Dr Anthony Tobia, a 47-year-old with close-cropped brown hair and a goatee, standing at the front of the room scribbling notes on a white board. There, he scrawled the name ‘Brett’ – the boyfriend of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine, who is obsessed with the song Desperado.

Brett, the group deduced, is a narcissist with antisocial tendencies, given his unreasonable demand that Elaine keep quiet whenever his favourite song is on, and his insistence that they cannot “share” the song as a couple. Dr Tobia drilled further: “Why is someone antisocial? What is the underlying reason?” This time, no response from the students. He answered for them: “Poor self-esteem. Unsupportive parents. Bullying. Who else on this show has a similar psychiatric history?”

“Costanza,” another student answered without hesitation.

There was no laughter throughout Tobia’s brisk, half-hour ‘didactic’ – med school’s word for a seminar – on this summer morning. The medical students at Rutgers University in New Jersey rarely earn their degree without diagnosing the characters of Seinfeld along with the real patients they encounter on hospital rounds. As part of their third-year clerkship in the psychiatry department, they spend six weeks discussing this show full of narcissists, obsessive-compulsives and neurotics with Tobia before moving on to surgery, OB-GYN, or other specialties.