After reading both Good’s and Adams’ articles this week about “mediating,” the first person that should come to mind is the fictional diagnostician portrayed in the Fox series House. Gregory House is a medical genius who is seen constantly dealing with mysterious symptoms and diseases of patients all around the world. What sets him apart from all other medical geniuses is his attitude, pill-popping demeanor, and personality which in turn influences the way he practices and treats patients (treat meaning both medically and personally). Before we can analyze the different acts shown in the above YouTube video using the lenses provided by Good and Adams, it’s substantial to understand the background behind this particular doctor to help form critiques or supportive arguments. Although this is a fictional television series, we must take a look into why House is the doctor who everyone around the world turns to and if his style of practice is congruent with the attributes described by Adams and Good as most productive and successful.
Gregory House attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate, and also attended Johns Hopkins Medical School and University of Michigan Medical School. In many episodes, House claims he is not a believer of God, which conflicts with many religious patients he has encountered (Fox). House reveals these personal beliefs to his patients in numerous circumstances because he has a strong hold of science as the answer and not the prayers. This idea runs parallel with Vincanne Adams’ point that “if villagers continue to see disease in a non-scientific, nonsensical way – that is, as a result of spirit attack, evil eye, loss of soul – then health will never be achieved. Ignorance is the real cause of disease” (Adams 44). House consistently works to eliminate this ignorance from the patient and tries to break it down to the patient at the physiological and scientific level.
As a well-recognized diagnostician, House approaches medical cases utilizing as many resources at his disposal. You can see in the video in multiple occasions where he is examining x-rays, conversing with patients near the magnetic resonance imaging machine, and recording symptoms and data (i.e. starting at 2:13) to help him brainstorm for solutions. This kind of work and devotion to a patient’s case is a big factor to House’s success at solving patients’ illnesses according to Adams; she states that “the language of evidence-based science, randomization, controls, and robust statistical analysis is seen as a language that will provide new information that was not already “commonsense” (Adams 51). An ordinary physician might not have all these useful tools by their side, which could also be why an ordinary physician might not have the capacity to solve these distinct, ambiguous, and mysterious medical cases. This could relate to global health because the foreign aspect of the emerging diseases could be as dissimilar of a case to the specialist at work as would a unique case would be to Dr. House. Being able to approach cases with “evidence-based science” could help eliminate the strange or unfamiliar picture of the situation.
So knowing that House is a highly regarded doctor, and that Good claims that great doctors “[condense] two central symbols – ‘competence’ and ‘caring’” (Good 91) in contemporary American medicine, let us look at how House works in the video with his patients. We will assume that competence is clearly a given since he works at the Head of the Diagnostics Department at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Without a high level of competence, it’s difficult to get a job at that rank. As far as “caring” goes, in the compilation of clips we see House (almost violently) stabbing patients with needles, flicking at or poking their faces, showing disinterest in the clinic (0:45), and rolling eyes. House doesn’t have the orthodox persona that is obtained from the first two years of Harvard Medical School, yet he has a different “care-free” attitude towards his patients that makes it seem like he is dehumanizing them. It’s evident in the video that while he treats the patients themselves as “machines,” he is always working hard and putting time into brainstorming ways to help the patient. So, could that be a sign of a form of caring? We don’t necessarily see Good’s basic form, described as “a language of relationships, of attitudes and emotions, and of innate qualities of persons; it is a nontechnical, commonsense language of interpersonal engagement, not a language of knowledge and facts” (Good 93). In the video, I rarely see interpersonal engagement between House and his patients. Does this mean he doesn’t care? He offers no exchange of emotion with his patients other than sarcasm and disinterest. Does this mean he doesn’t care?
If we expect doctors to be competent and caring, why would Dr. House be so highly regarded as one of the best doctors when he hardly shows any upfront display of care? Perhaps patients see doctors as experts of human body machine, which could be why we subconsciously accept the lack of “care” despite asking for it.
Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. 1993. “’Learning Medicine’: The Constructing of Medical Knowledge at Harvard Medical School.” Pp. 81-107. In Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press.
House MD - Is There a Doctor in the House ? Dir. NCISmelanie. Perf. Hugh Laurie. Fox. YouTube. 5 July 2009. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-supp7Ow9o>.
"FOX Broadcasting Company - House TV Show - House TV Series - House Episode Guide." FOX Broadcasting Company - FOX Television Shows. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. http://www.fox.com/house/about/.
Vincanne, Adams. . “Against Global Health? Arbitrating Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense through Health.” In Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. Edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland. Pp. 40-58. New York: New York University Press.
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