Gregory House²

APPEARANCE

Dr. Gregory House is portrayed as a middle-aged man with a tall and lean physique with salt and pepper hair. He typically dresses in casual attire, often wearing jeans and a t-shirt or a lab coat. House has a distinctive appearance, with an unshaven face and a rugged, slightly disheveled hairstyle. He walks with a slight limp due to an previous leg injury, using a cane wherever he goes.

PERSONALITY (1)

Equipped with a dry and acerbic sense of humor, House is enigmatic and conceals many facets of his personality with a veneer of sarcasm. He appears and sometimes himself claims to be narcissistic, and appears to have a disdain for most people, leading some to label him "a misanthrope". He has contempt for most societal institutions, including feminism and religion. House is an atheist and it is implied that he is nihilistic. These traits make him something of a byronic hero. Despite his cynicism, he does seem to care about his colleagues to a certain extent and while considering them "idiots" is able to sometimes put aside his pride and apologize when he has offended them in a particularly sardonic fashion. House uses his flippancy to conceal his affection toward his colleagues, and denies it to the extent that he himself sometimes forgets it. House is a total maverick and has stated that he frequents prostitutes. In one episode, his best friend Dr. Wilson states that House could have Asperger's Syndrome, but later tells House that he only wishes he had Asperger's so he could get away with more in life. Wilson has also told House that his obsession with solving cases has nothing to do with saving lives but that while "some doctors have a Messianic complex, House has a Rubik's complex", that is to say, he's more concerned with figuring out what is wrong with his patients than he is with saving their lives. The latter he does simply because it's his job. This is shown when he sometimes tries to diagnose patients after they're dead, such as in the episode "97 Seconds". However, there have been more than one occasion in which he put at risk his career, freedom and sometimes even his life to save a patient, leaving open how much he doesn't care about his patients' lives. Occasionally, House can display the same sort of hypocrisy he decries in others, such as his derision for Cuddy when she had the naming ceremony for her daughter.

PERSONALITY (2)

A particularly egregious example would be his acquisition of a handgun after being shot by Moriarty, while stating to Masters that the Second Amendment is the part of the Constitution which says that people have the right to be stupid. He also apparently has inherited John House's service automatic and Mameluke sword. No Reason, Euphoria (Part 1), Last Temptation, Perils of Paranoia. House hides most of his emotions behind his ever-present snide and witty comebacks. He receives a lot of flak for coming off as unsympathetic towards his patients and for being relatively unmoved by anything that occurs in the hospital. However, distancing himself from the emotional labor of being a physician in this way allows him to approach problems logically and with a clear-headed perspective, making him one of the best doctors around. Sometimes, when talking one-on-one with dying patients, his harsh demeanor quickly vanishes and he can become very warm and comforting. He also does care for some people, mainly for his best friend, Wilson, and if really pressed, his team. His existence is like his own punishment in hell; he sees everything that could have been with two of his patients. If his own diagnosis was correct, he could've been the volleyball player who kept her leg. If he had chosen to amputate, he could've been the farmer with the prosthesis who still had a fulfilling, active life. Instead, he got the worst middle ground: a leg that’s essentially useless and causes him constant pain, the worst part being that he could still get rid of it for a prosthetic leg, thus ending the pain and making him able get off his Vicodin addiction. However, his pride will never allow it, thus creating the perfect prison: he could escape at any time, yet he’s the only one keeping himself there, with this self-awareness being the true torture.

EARLY LIFE (1)

House was born in 1959 , One possible birthday is June 11, 1959. He is the child of Blythe House, a housewife who was married to Marine pilot John House. At the same time that John was overseas, Blythe was also having an affair with Thomas Bell whom House believed was his biological father due to the physical characteristics they share, but this turned out to be false. As his father served on active duty through most of House's childhood and adolescence, House has lived in a variety of countries, such as Egypt, the Philippines and Japan. As a result, House is able to speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, has conversational Brazilian Portuguese and is able to read at least some Hindi. Furthermore, he was once shown reading a French medical journal and an untranslated Japanese manga. He additionally has some knowledge of several others. For example, he used Yiddish, Russian and Latin phrases several times, but it is unknown how much of these languages he knows. House was obviously a bright child, a mixed blessing as his harshly demanding father and enabling mother obviously had high hopes for him. He cultivated a variety of interests, such as chemistry, playing the piano and guitar. However, it appears that his isolation from people his age and his poor relationship with his parents led House to become something of a loner. He had little to no friends growing up which probably contributed to his antisocial behavior. It is implied that he frequently rebelled against his father and was punished as a result with both intense physical discomfort and emotional isolation.At the age of 12, realizing that his father had been away during his conception, House deduced that John was not his biological father. House confronted John with this information, and as a result they stopped speaking to one another for an entire summer, communicating only through hand-written notes.

EARLY LIFE (2)

Their relationship, however, returned to normal following this brief spat (although there is sufficient evidence presented throughout the series that points towards John's abuse of a young House). John treated House coldly, likely due to a lack of understanding between the two. It could be said that John did not resent House, but was a believer in tough love. Another theory is that, considering his punishments were so harsh, John more than likely abused House as a way of exercising his frustration at Blythe's infidelity. This fact did not stop Blythe from supporting her husband, which made House all the more resentful towards his father. In One Day, One Room House confides in Eve that his father repeatedly abused him throughout his childhood, making him take ice water baths and sleep outside in the cold as a way of administering discipline. House strongly hints at this being the source of the fragility in his and his father's relationship. House is emotionally damaged by the dysfunction in these primary relationships, citing his mother's dishonesty and his father's hostility as causes of his damaged personality. His colleagues have acknowledged that this is the source of House's deep-seated unhappiness, and cynicism; his fear of intimacy, praise, and the unknown; as well as his lack of acceptance regarding traditional societal values and rituals. It was during his visit to a Japanese hospital in his early teens that House met a disheveled-looking man appearing to be a janitor but despite his appearance, was actually the greatest medical practitioner in the entire hospital. He later discovered the man was a buraku, an "untouchable" in the Japanese caste system who made no attempt to fit in with the rest of the hospital staff. When one of House's friends is gravely wounded in a rock climbing accident, the doctors turn to the buraku healer for his expertise.

EARLY LIFE (3)

House cites this as the primary motivation behind his choice to become a doctor, noting that when all else failed, the doctors heeded the buraku's advice despite their intense distaste for him. The treatment of the buraku healer presumably mirrors the manner in which House was treated as a young man: being ignored by his "betters" despite his atypical, prodigious intellect, profound understanding of human nature, and wisdom beyond his years. In his late teenage years, House went to a prep school in the United States where, in addition to keeping very good grades, he played varsity lacrosse and demonstrated a keen interest in music, both modern and classical. House went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland where he was in the pre-med program, maintaining an excellent GPA and eventually getting a perfect score on his MCAT. Before he went to med school, he thought about getting a Ph.D. in physics due to his desire to research dark matter. He obtained admission to Johns Hopkins Medical School under Brightman and Gilmar, and was one of their best students, eventually becoming the favorite to obtain a prestigious internship at the Mayo Clinic despite many run-ins with faculty members who he felt were treating him unfairly. However, he was caught cheating by his fellow student Philip Weber, the man whom he later treated as his arch-nemesis, and proceedings were set in motion to finalize his expulsion. Weber received the internship that House was supposed to receive. (Also, he was a lacrosse cheerleader.) Despite his academic misconduct, House was accepted into the University of Michigan's Medical System on a provisional basis while waiting out the appeal period at Johns Hopkins. During his time at UM House spent most of his time hanging around the university bookstore, where he eventually met a young undergraduate named Lisa Cuddy.

EARLY LIFE (4)

Following a one night stand, however, House had learned he would not be re-admitted to Johns Hopkins and he would have to repeat his final year of medical school. As a result, he withdrew from his social life and ceased his pursuit of a formal relationship with Cuddy. House ultimately completed his internship and obtained residencies in pathology, nephrology, and infectious disease, in addition to his completion of a double specialty. House attended a medical convention in New Orleans, Louisiana where he noticed a young medical school graduate carrying around unopened divorce papers all weekend. He followed the doctor, James Wilson, to a bar where a man kept playing Billy Joel's "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on the jukebox which reminded Wilson of his recent breakup, prompting the two to get into an argument. In a fit of anger, Wilson threw a bottle and broke an antique mirror, getting himself arrested for assault, vandalism, and property destruction. House followed him to the police station and bailed him out. They spent the rest of the convention together (mostly drinking) and became close friends.The year this happened is uncertain, as Wilson's age, and the years he was married to Sam Carr, and later Bonnie, are contradicted several times in the series. In Lockdown, Wilson says Sam divorced him in 1991, the next episode Knight Fall it was around 2000, which is impossible considering the chronology of other events such as House's infarction happening then and House never having met Sam, not to mention how Wilson managed to get divorced three times between 2000 and 2006. A likely time for House and Wilson meeting is the summer of 1995: Wilson's brother Danny (who House didn't know existed) disappeared 9 years before Season 1, while Wilson was still in medical school.

EARLY LIFE (5)

Sam was about to move to Baltimore, presumably for her residency after she finished an unpaid internship, and Wilson planned to follow her there, but his degrees say he took his medical school degree up at the University of Pennsylvania, not far from Princeton University and Trenton, Danny's last known location; Cuddy is supposed to have met Wilson at some point during the period between his first divorce and his marriage to Bonnie, so House likely introduced them around the time House was hired at PPTH, when Wilson still would've been a resident. As early as Detox we know that Wilson was best friends with House before the infarction.

DISABILITY (1)

5 years before the start of the series, House suffered an infarction in his leg while playing golf. Unfortunately, the only symptom was leg pain, and by the time House himself realized that he was suffering from muscle death, the leg was in such a bad state that amputation was the recommended course of action. However, House rejected the suggestion and instead suggested that he undergo a procedure to bypass circulation around the dead muscle. The result was intense pain during the healing process, with the muscle death leading to cardiac arrest, House was then put into a chemically induced coma. However, while House was comatose, Stacy, acting as his medical proxy, decided to go with Dr. Cuddy's suggestion to have the dead muscle surgically removed. Although this most likely saved House's life, it left him with permanent intense pain in his right leg. The wound on his leg still bears an obvious scar from where the muscle was removed and there is a divot in his skin where the muscle used to be. House's anger over Stacy's decision not to trust him poisoned the relationship and led to Stacy leaving. House started to lean heavily on Wilson for emotional support, eventually leading in part to Wilson's divorce from his second wife, Bonnie Wilson. House's condition is most likely made worse by the fact that prior to the infarction, he was quite an active athlete, engaging in golf and running on a regular basis. As a result of the pain, House became addicted to the narcotic pain killer, Vicodin. It should be noted, however, that even before his disability, House admitted to recreational drug use. Although House realizes he is dependent, he believes the Vicodin is the only thing that will allow him to overcome the pain and allow him to function.

DISABILITY (2)

His dependence on the drug has gotten him into trouble on several occasions, and his colleagues are unsure whether House's antisocial personality traits are the result of his addiction, his pain, or actual personality. House is very reluctant to talk about the incident which damaged his leg and can be easily offended when it is brought up. In Three Stories, he tells a group of students about the leg injury (but disguises his identity), and becomes infuriated when they, like his original doctors, cannot figure out what was wrong. House is very sensitive of the appearance of his right thigh — it is badly scarred from the operations. Both Cuddy and Cate Milton have noted his extreme reluctance to show it to anyone, particularly in intimate situations. However, during his period of psychosomatic pain after the departure of Stacy, he deliberately showed it to Cuddy to emphasize the nature of his disability and the cause of his pain in order to get a shot of morphine. House has generally defended his decision to try to save his leg, but in the Season 6 finale Help Me, when faced with a patient who was making a similar decision and was reluctant to agree to an amputation, House finally admitted that his decision turned out to be a bad one. He admitted that if he had gone ahead with the amputation, he probably would not be in constant pain and would still be in a positive relationship.

RELATIONSHIP

Although House has had a number of co-workers, employers, lovers, and acquaintances during his life, it appears that he has only had seven real relationships during his life. This is primarily because House's personality is most likely a deliberate attempt to alienate those who want to get to know him better. The seven people who have been able to overcome his defensiveness have found a person worth salvaging, or even cherishing.