Table Of Content
Potts had been constantly badgered by the upper hierarchy and haunted by a patient—nicknamed "The Yellow Man" (due to the jaundice from his fulminant necrotic hepatitis)--who goes comatose and eventually (after months) dies possibly because Potts had not put him on steroids. Basch secretly euthanizes a patient called Saul the leukemic tailor, whose illness had gone into remission but was back in the hospital in incredible pain and begging for death. Basch becomes more and more emotionally unstable until his friends force him to attend a mime performance by Marcel Marceau, where he has an experience of catharsis and helps him recover his emotional stability. 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. Basch survives the rotation with Jo by claiming to perform numerous tests and treatments on the "gomers" while doing nothing to treat them.
Birth of Pentecostal movement
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The Week(s) in Books
Dr. Roy Basch is an intelligent but naive former Rhodes Scholar and BMS ("Best Medical School")-educated intern ('tern') working in a hospital called the House of God after having completed his medical studies at BMS. Basch is poorly prepared for the grueling hours and the sudden responsibilities with limited guidance from senior attending physicians. He begins the year on a rotation supervised by an enigmatic and iconoclastic senior resident who goes by the name "The Fat Man". The Fat Man teaches him that the only way to keep patients in good health and to survive psychologically is to break the rules. The Fat Man provides his interns with wisdom such as his own "Laws of the House of God".
‘Rebel’ redacted: Rebel Wilson’s book chapter on Sacha Baron Cohen struck from some copies
In recent months, since I finished residency and began working as an attending physician, my way has been smoothed by the grunt work and flattery of trainees. My residents mine the electronic medical record for data and compose my notes; my medical students actually laugh out loud at my jokes. I recognize the precarity of all this, the seductive notion that this deference is not a consequence of a pernicious hierarchy but rather a consequence of my own hard work, wisdom, and virtue. I hope never to be the dupe making sexist jokes that aren’t funny, to whom nobody in the room is willing to tell the truth. I hope to remember that I am a wealthy person now, and hand-wringing about the cost of private preschool would render me as unsympathetic as a self-appointed advocate for the oppressed.
Perhaps it explains why Basch presumes that his book is everybody’s favorite, and that the doctors and nurses in the E.R. Some of them undoubtedly are, but a good portion of them are just staring at a fascinating specimen. We medical folk are simple people, and a famous writer in the E.R., like a case of Sydenham’s chorea or an interestingly shaped object lodged in a rectum, excites our general interest. I had learned that if I—or any of my family—go to a doctor, it’s helpful to say I’m a doctor, and when they ask what kind, I tell them and then ask, ‘Have you heard of the novel The House of God?
Mostly we were too tired for fornication, though, or we were in love with our spouses and sensible enough to be faithful to the ones who kept us fed and sane. There is an actual orgy in the call room in “The House of God” which, in retrospect, feels quaint. As sympathetic as I am to Updike’s concerns about social control, and as nostalgic as I may be for the time when I wrote like a child—blithe, mindless of consequence, the only audience in my mind an audience of people who already loved me—I am no longer a child.
Further reading
Molly goes on to work alongside Berry when she, too, joins the clinic. There is minimal drama and no consequences for Basch—a male fantasy fulfilled, even if there was no penetration. It was a raunchy, troubling and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon devoured by a legion of medical students, interns, residents and doctors. It introduced characters like “Fat Man” — the all-knowing but crude senior resident — and medical slang like Gomer, for Get Out of My Emergency Room. I have many shortcomings as a human, and one of them is my failure to sympathize with the struggles of the wealthy to secure private-school spots for their children.
When should physicians read the House of God? - Kevin MD
When should physicians read the House of God?.
Posted: Fri, 02 Aug 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Samuel Shem, 34 Years After 'The House of God' - The Atlantic
Samuel Shem, 34 Years After 'The House of God'.
Posted: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Given these explicit missions, Shem’s tone-deaf approach to the narrative effects of privilege-flaunting is unfortunate. Although many of the characters, including the physicians, in “Man’s 4th Best Hospital” are women, and, although Bergman has gotten beyond the trope of nurse as dumb mons, his depiction of gender is still old-fashioned. Men are strong and zany and ha-ha funny; women are sensitive and moral and wise, happy either to bed the men or to mother them. The virile Basch’s formidable sex drive is thwarted, but later he is grateful and falls to his knees on the sidewalk—thank goodness Berry never needs to know!
He created the ‘Critically Ill Airway’ course and teaches on numerous courses around the world. He is one of the founders of the FOAM movement (Free Open-Access Medical education) and is co-creator of litfl.com, the RAGE podcast, the Resuscitology course, and the SMACC conference. Shem” brings along a few colleagues who were the basis for the characters in the novel. Listening to them reminisce over coffee, it is clear how proud they are of being part of the novel and prouder still of the reforms in graduate medical education that came in its wake. Called “The House of God,” the book was drawn from real life, and 30 years after its initial publication, it is still part of the medical conversation. Nor should Updike have worried that the “racist” label would eliminate “free-wheeling multiethnic caricature” from Bergman’s writing.
It is ironic, in a sick way, when the art that ought to bring us closer accidentally insists that some of us are not really worth the effort. I read “The House of God” in medical school, as many of us do, and was left looking askance at my chosen field. Because the book is lionized so uncritically in my profession, I could only suspect that my future colleagues did not hold women in particularly high regard. Roy rotates through four different wards in the hospital, spending approximately three months in each.
The patient gave a yelp, leaped up off the mattress, and began to cry with pain. Donowitz looked down and found that he’d ripped a big chunk of flesh from the guy’s arm. Embarrassed, he took the piece of flesh and tried to put it back, patting it down as if he could make it stay in place.
He has completed fellowship training in both intensive care medicine and emergency medicine, as well as post-graduate training in biochemistry, clinical toxicology, clinical epidemiology, and health professional education. Gomer referred to the elderly, chronically ill patients no intern wants to deal with. The shorthand LOL in NAD (Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress), was for patients needlessly admitted by their private physicians for expensive work-ups in an era when health insurance reimbursements flowed like the Mississippi. I think we women want revenge; we want “blood on the ceiling,” as Patricia Lockwood gave us in her recent epic takedown of Updike, in the London Review of Books. But also, perhaps, we want the possibility of individual moral progress, particularly among powerful men who have used their power to demean us.
With a cool expertise the Fat Man put a gauze compression bandage on the wound. Dr. Bergman, now 65, is retired from psychiatry and works as a full-time novelist and playwright. And Dr. Bob,” a play he wrote with his wife, Janet Surrey, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, had a respectable run off Broadway. His fourth novel, about a primary care physician in the Hudson Valley, “The Spirit of the Place,” was published in 2008 by Kent State University Press. Over the years, it has served as a required guidebook for medical neophytes and a clarion call for the old guard to make striking changes in the way we train young physicians. Today, the revival is considered by historians to be the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20th century.
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