Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Shem added four more "Laws" in his reflection on The House of God 34 years later.
Show me a BMS (Best Medical Student, a student at The Best Medical School) who only triples my work and I will kiss his feet.If you don't take a temperature, you can't find a fever.The only good admission is a dead admission.There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a #14G needle and a good strong arm.The patient is the one with the disease.At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse.He is convinced that he could not have gotten through the year without Berry, and he asks her to marry him. But even while vacationing, bad memories of the House of God haunt Basch. The book ends with Basch and Berry vacationing in France before he begins his psychiatry residency, which is how the book begins as well, because the whole book is a flashback. Basch becomes more and more emotionally unstable, until finally his friends force him to attend a mime performance by Marcel Marceau, where he has an experience of catharsis and recovers his emotional stability.īy the end of the book, it turns out that the psychiatry resident, Cohen, has managed to inspire almost the whole year's group of interns and two well-spoken policemen, Gilheeney and Quick, to pursue a career in psychiatry, and that the terrible year has convinced most of the interns to receive psychiatric help.
Basch becomes more callous and he secretly euthanizes a patient, a man called Saul the leukemic tailor, whose illness had gone into remission but was back in the hospital in incredible pain and begging for death. A colleague, Wayne Potts, who had been constantly badgered by the upper hierarchy and haunted by a patient (nicknamed "The Yellow Man" for his fulminant necrotic hepatitis, who goes comatose and eventually dies possiblyīecause Potts had not put him on steroids), commits suicide. He has adulterous trysts with various nurses (portrayed in great detail) and social service workers (nicknamed the "Sociable Cervix") and his relationship with his girlfriend Berry suffers. His personality and outlook change, and he has outbursts of temper. The book also details the great amount of hard, distasteful work the interns must perform, the sometimes poor working conditions, their lack of sleep, their lack of time to spend with friends and family, and the emotional demands of the work.ĭuring the course of the novel, working in the hospital takes a psychological toll on Basch. These patients again do well, and Basch's reputation as an excellent intern is maintained. Basch survives the rotation with Jo by claiming to perform numerous tests and treatments on the gomers while in reality he does nothing. Roy is then supervised by a more conventional resident named Jo, who, unlike the Fat Man, follows the rules, but unknowingly hurts the gomers by doing so.
Later, the Fat Man must leave for a rotation with another team. Therefore, his team is recognized as one of the best in the hospital, and he is recognized as an excellent intern by everyone, even though he is breaking the rules. Because he follows the Fat Man's advice and does nothing to the gomers, they remain in good health. Basch becomes convinced of the accuracy of the Fat Man's advice and begins to follow it. One of his teachings is that in the House of God, most of the diagnostic procedures, treatments, and medications received by the patients known as "gomers" (see Glossary, below) actually harm these patients instead of helping them. The Fat Man provides his interns with wisdom such as his own "Laws of the House of God" (which amount to 13 by the end of the book). The Fat Man teaches him that the only way to keep the patients in good health and to survive psychologically is to break the official rules. He begins the year on a rotation supervised by an enigmatic and iconoclastic senior resident who goes by the name The Fat Man. He is poorly prepared for the grueling hours and the sudden responsibilities without good guidance from senior attending physicians. Roy Basch is an intelligent but naive intern working in a hospital called the House of God after completing his medical studies at the BMS ("Best Medical School").