The House of God, a Book as Sexist as It Was Influential, Gets a Sequel

Table Of Content

• The week’s bestselling books, April 28
• Abcarian: How Santa Monica’s Rape Treatment Center revolutionized the way we treat victims of sexual assault
• Single, Carefree, Mellow
• Letters to the Editor: People with epilepsy are afraid to talk to their doctors. How California can change that
• ‘Rebel’ redacted: Rebel Wilson’s book chapter on Sacha Baron Cohen struck from some copies
• Sending of missionaries
• Azusa Street Revival

He faces his own fears, disillusionment, and sorrows even as he gains medical confidence, but for much of the book he struggles to acknowledge and process these emotions. To cope with these feelings, he and the other interns, all men, turn to drinking, prescribing themselves medications, and sex with the hospital’s female staff. Over time, Roy begins to drift from his serious girlfriend, Berry, who is a clinical psychologist.

The week’s bestselling books, April 28

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Abcarian: How Santa Monica’s Rape Treatment Center revolutionized the way we treat victims of sexual assault

Fats got excited about this, wanting to publish “The Case of Duck’s Ass Donowitz.” The patient flirted with death but pulled through. He was discharged a month later, thinking it usual, even a necessary part of his successful course of treatment in the House, for the skin to have been ripped off his arm by his dear and glorious physician. Puzzled, he said something about “sometimes you have to do it a bit harder” and took hold of the skin, wadded it up, and gave it a tremendous twist.

Single, Carefree, Mellow

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.

I would like to know if we ever get to be both women physicians and people, or if the two conditions are incompatible. A 2019 short essay by Shem[2] and an accompanying online documentary[3] document the origins of the book and the characters upon which it is based. One of Jenny’s favorite books is “Breast and Eggs” by Meiko Kawakami, a novel translated from Japanese that sheds light on femininity through female relationships and a woman’s relationship to her own body. She just finished reading Han Kang’s novel “Greek Lessons ,” her follow-up to “The Vegetarian,” a thought-provoking thriller about how one woman’s choice to stop eating meat changes the course of her life and the lives around her. Perhaps more important, “The House of God” helped initiate a dialogue on the effects of sleepless medical training that continues, albeit in a milder form, as evidenced by an Institute of Medicine report in 2008 recommending major reforms in resident physician duty hours. Perhaps forty years of deference explain why Shem, like Updike, writes as a child would, imagining an audience that will express only adoration.

‘Rebel’ redacted: Rebel Wilson’s book chapter on Sacha Baron Cohen struck from some copies

My favorite book of all-time is probably “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, and I’m currently finishing up Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, “Klara and the Sun,” a speculative fiction novel told from the point of view of an android companion. An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews. Just make sure you’re feeling happy and healthy and that you have a big grain of salt at the ready. Although these laws are potent satire they do have a firm basis in reality. For instance, in this age of modern medicine, Law 13 has never been more relevant and Law 3 is a good reminder to keep your cool.

Sending of missionaries

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.

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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.

Azusa Street Revival

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. The Fat Man serves as a crucial character for Roy as he progresses through the year, helping him understand how to deliver good medical care within the confines of the American health care system. Despite everything he has learned about being a medical doctor, Roy decides to take a year off after his internship and then to become a psychiatrist. Throughout The House of God, Shem uses satire to call attention to deficits in the medical training system and what he sees as American health care’s immoral reliance on capitalist principles to provide care for patients.

We want to recognize that progress when it comes, even as we continue to deserve real justice. Even if I would not wish to be or know the women in Bergman’s book, I recognize an effortful appreciation of women here. In medicine, we are only just beginning to reckon with our gender-based wage gap, our failure to promote women leaders, our utter indifference to the needs of working mothers, and the systematic harassment of women trainees. Led by groups like Time’s Up Healthcare, we are beginning to discuss these things. It is all too slow, and, on my more exhausted days, I wish for torches and pitchforks rather than just these words.

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?

I think we’re looking for all the different ways the human experience is interpreted and expressed, and we look to provide a wide variety of ways people communicate those experiences in print. It has been many years since I first read ‘The House of God‘ by Samuel Shem, back before I even started medical school. This satirical novel opened the door for a world of medical satire, including TV shows like Cardiac Arrest and Scrubs. It introduced the world to dubious terms like ‘GOMER‘, popularized the diagnostic ‘zebra‘, and taught us the difference between the ‘O sign‘ and the ‘Q sign‘. I would have liked to see Jo return, to see the consequences of her treatment in “The House of God” explored many years later. I would like to know if we women in medicine—particularly those who have been harassed and demeaned and underpaid—get to live full lives, after all.

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.