The House of God [Paperback]

Samuel Shem (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 7, 2010

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative journey that takes us into the lives of Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country. Young Dr. Basch and his irreverant confident, known only as the Fat Man, will learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings.Samuel Shem has done what few in American medicine have dared to do-create an unvarnished, unglorified, and amazingly forthright portrait revealing the depth of caring, pain, pathos, and tragedy felt by all who spend their lives treating patients and stand at the crossroads between science and humanity.With over two million copies sold worldwide, The House of God has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels of the twentieth century and compared to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith for its poignant portrayal of the education of American doctors.

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fascinating." ---The Wall Street Journal

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From the Publisher

"Brilliant !" -- Chicago Tribune. "Bawdy blistering... this is Catch-22 with stethoscopes." --Cosmopolitan.

Now a classic! The hilarious novel of the healing arts that reveals everything your doctor never wanted you to know. Six eager interns -- they saw themselves as modern saviors-to-be. they came from the top of their medical school class to the bottom of the hospital staff to serve a year in the time-honored tradition, racing to answer the flash of on-duty call lights and nubile nurses. But only the Fat Man --the calm, all-knowing resident -- could sustain them in their struggle to survive, to stay sane, to love-and even to be doctors when their harrowing year was done.

"Does for the practice of medicine what Catch-22 and M*A *S *H did for the practice of warfare." -- The Newark Star-Ledger

"Wildly funny... frightening... outrageous, moving... a story of modern medicine rarely, if, ever told." -- The Houston Chronicle --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade; Reissue edition (September 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425238091
• ISBN-13: 978-0425238097
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (221 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Medical

More About the Author

Samuel Shem (pen name of Stephen Bergman) is a novelist, playwright, and, for three decades, a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. His novels include The House of God, Fine, and Mount Misery. He is coauthor with his wife, Janet Surrey, of the hit Off-Broadway play Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (winner of the 2007 Performing Arts Award of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence), and We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men. Editors Carol Donley and Martin Kohn are cofounders of the Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College. Since 1990 the Center has brought humanities and the health care professions together in mutually enriching interactions, including interdisciplinary courses, summer symposia, and the Literature and Medicine book series from The Kent State University Press. The first three anthologies in the series grew out of courses in the Biomedical Humanities program at Hiram. Then the series expanded to include original writing and edited collections by physicians, nurses, humanities scholars, and artists. The books in the series are designed to serve as resources and texts for health care education as well as for the general public.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

264 of 266 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The real deal if you're in medicine, scary for the layman December 19, 2001

By Mark E. Baxter VINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

There are all kinds of things I hate about this book. I hate remembering how long I would go without sleep and the psychic torture that an internship inflicts on you. I hated the depersonalization of patients. I hated the sexual escapades. Most of all, I hated having in print the real feelings of an intern who has been up for three days - praying on the way to the ER that that Nursing Home Gomer with 20 fatal diagnoses would have the decency to croak before you got there so you could get an extra five minutes of sleep or a stale doughnut before the cafeteria closed again.

Shem portrays masterfully the jumble of emotions of a typical intern. There is a superficial level of glossy brown-nosing that got you into med school in the first place. Buzz words like compassion, continuity of care and empathy are used with the teaching physicians and in meetings. Then there is a deeper level of survival where you would kill your mother for 5 minutes of sleep or being able to crap without the code blue pager going off. This level is usually not discussed or written about in many of the typical intern coming-of-age books out there. Not because it isn't true, but because it's uncomfortable and offensive to non-physicians. Shem is the master of this level of medical thinking. No one else even comes close. Shem approaches but doesn't quite get to an even more primal level - that of duty. This level is what keeps an intern from punching his residency directors or the arrogant surgeon who asks him "What is the difference between a sh*thead and a brown-noser" and then tells you the answer is depth perception.(True story) It's what makes you do your best when you know the patient is hopeless or even abusive as you try your best to save them from themselves or some disease....

The humor is black as night and the sex is soft-core porn, according to my nephew in medical school to whom I sent a copy of this book.

House of God has two profound themes. The first is a detailed description of medicine and medical training. This theme is presented with black humor, and some (but not as much as you think) exaggeration. I have read nothing that does this better. The second theme of the book is universal, however. It is the theme of Man vs. World and the World wins, but the Man is too maimed to know it.

The book still disturbs and haunts me because Shem puts in print graphically and eloquently some of the thoughts and occurences that we don't even admit to ourselves. Read more ›

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars House of Reality January 9, 2000

By MD resident

Format:Mass Market Paperback

It's interesting to hear non-medical opinions on HOG. This book is actually not that humorous. I can see how it "seems" to be; with all the dark morbid humor and the LAWS. A colleage told me not to read this book until i had finished my 3rd year of MD-school. Why? Until you put yourself on the ward, this book doesn't mean much to you. I didn't believe him and read it at the end of my 2nd year. I read it again at the end of my 3rd year. It was like i was reading a different novel. There is no way to clearly describe the sensation of having 7 admissions on call...all gomers....trying desperatly to BUFF and TURF them.

This book is a must read for the doctor to be. The nonmedical world has to realise that what seems as perverse dark sick humor (gomers, turfing, not doing anything, the only good admission is a dead admission) is merely an attempt to survive the onslaught of internship. Balance fatigue with limited knowledge and throw in some unparralled responsibility and you get a taste of what it's like.

House of God does just that.

Oh.. and never ever.... go to a teaching hospital in July. :)

68 of 76 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The "Catch 22" of the medical world. June 15, 2000

By Yuval Ben- Amnon,MD.

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I have read this book three times: When I was a first year medical student I found it to be exaggerated. When I was in my intern year I found it to be an understatement. Reading it for the third time in the middle of my residency allowed me to have a more mature perspective of this book. I find it to have a striking resemblence to another classic: "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller. I will start by saying that both books are NOT great literature masterpieces . They do not stand in one line with Joyce, Amos Oz, Steinback or Hemmingway and as a work of art they therefore deserve , in my opoinion 2 or 3 stars of rating.They do share, however, a unique quality which is this: They both manage to capture in an astonishing accurracy, through sarcasm and absurd, all that is twisted, wrong and cruel in the systems they deal with. Being both a doctor and an IDF officer, I can testify from personal experience that both the military and the medical field have a lot in common , mainly that they both are a stressfull, wearing enviroments. Shem's accurate perception lead this book to being the sharpest description of this enviroment so far, just as "Catch 22" was in its times I therefore share the enthusiasm of the majority of the reviewers of this book, as much as I can identify with the ones who found it disappointing in the literary sense. It therfore gets a rating of 4.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Laws of the House of God (and GOMERs *do* go to ground) June 25, 2002

By Dr. van der Linden

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I read *The House of God* the year after I completed my own internship, while running a rural clinic (a la NORTHERN EXPOSURE, but back during the Carter Administration) and contending with the first onslaught of Managed Money (also known as Mangled Care).

It was strange. I recognized the unarguable truth of the Laws of the House of God, and knew the Fat Man and Jo (the Journal Club Maniac) and all the slurpers and sleazebags and "physician entrepreneurs" for whom I'd spent a year of my life doing scut while salvaging their patients. I couldn't stop laughing through the first half of the book, and then a curious thing happened.

The second half of the novel left me more and more depressed, remembering the bleakness and pain of that year, and summoning up the hard lessons I had learned -- and was still learning as a young physician in the first years of practice. It reminded me that no matter what I did, the slurpers and the self-righteous stuffed shirts in my profession were going to win. They were going to keep on degrading and destroying patients and their families, gorging on the increasing wealth being poured into "the health care industry," and beating the hell out of decent physicians who actually dared give a damn about the humanity of the people who come to us for treatment.

And now, nearly three decades later, the laughs are completely gone and the truth is beyond concealment. *The House of God* is a wonderful glimpse of life as a scutpuppy back in the '70s, yes -- but more than that, it's a prophetic anticipation of the destruction of what was once a pretty decent profession, working to achieve something more than a favorable return on investment....

The '70s weren't "the good old days" by any stretch of the imagination, but who could've believed back then that the 21st Century was going to be so godawfully much worse? Read more ›