The House Of God

The House of God is a satirical novel by Samuel Shem (a pseudonym of the psychiatrist Stephen Bergman), published in 1978. It portrays the psychological harm done to medical interns during the course of medical internship in the early 1970s.
Storyline
Dr. Roy Basch is an intelligent, naive intern working in a hospital called the House of God after completing his medical studies at the BMS ("Best Medical School"). He is poorly prepared for the grueling hours and the sudden responsibilities without good guidance from senior attending physicians. He commences the year on a rotation supervised by an enigmatic, iconoclastic and wise senior resident who goes by the name The Fat Man. The Fat Man teaches him that the only way to keep the patients
His personality and outlook change, and he has outbursts of temper. He has adulterous trysts with various nurses (portrayed in great detail) and Social Service workers (nicknamed the "Sociable Cervix") and his relationship with his faithful girlfriend Berry suffers. A colleague, Wayne Potts, who had been constantly badgered by the upper hierarchy and haunted by a patient (named Lazlow and nicknamed "The Yellow Man" for his fulminant necrotic hepatitis, who goes comatose and eventually dies because Potts had not put him on steroids early on) commits suicide. Basch becomes more callous, and he secretly euthanizes a patient, a man called Saul the leukemic tailor, who had gone into remission once but was back in the hospital in incredible pain and begging for death. 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
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. But even while vacationing, bad memories of the House of God haunt Basch. He is convinced that he could not have gotten through the year without Berry, and he asks her to marry him.
Context and impact
The book takes place during the Watergate scandal, and follows such events as the resignation of Spiro T. Agnew and the stepping-down of Richard Nixon.
The book is very likely autobiographical, as the BMS is a thinly veiled Harvard Medical School (commonly called HMS), and The House of God representing the Beth Israel Hospital, now a part of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the HMS-affiliated hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts; "Man's Best Hospital" represents MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital.)
In any case, upon its appearance, many American doctors felt that The House of God resonated with their own experiences during their internship training.[citation needed] However, according to the author, many older physicians were offended by the work.[citation needed]
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