I’m finally getting around to reading The House of God, the classic satirical novel about the beauty and horrors of medical training. The author is “Samuel Shem,” the pen name of Stephen Bergman, MD, PhD. It is a black comedy roman-a-clef full that follows narrator Dr. Roy Basch as he struggles to survive his intern year at Beth Israel Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School (thinly disguised as “The House of God” and the “Best Medical School” or BMS). After this tumultuous year, Basch—like Dr. Bergman himself—decides to flee internal medicine for psychiatry, a field he considers more humanistic and compassionate.
The novel provides an unsanitized look at the practice of medicine, full of gallows humor. It is also a product of its time (the 1970s) and some of the passages haven’t aged well—there is definitely enough un-PC material on sex, gender and race that I’m …
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