Gregory House ||🚷MD🚷||

Name

Gregory House

Family

"John House (dad)" "Blythe House (mom)" "Unnamed (grandparents)" "Unnamed (brother)" "Unnamed (younger cousin and older cousin)" "Sarah (aunt)" "Unnamed(uncle)"

Age/Date of birth

"44 (Plot)" "May 15, 1959"

Career

"Student (formerly)" "Patient (formerly)" "Inmate (formerly)" "Medical Doctor" "Residency in Pathology, Nephrology (formerly)" "Infectious disease specialist" "Intensivist" "Diagnostician" "Head of Diagnostic Medicine"

Residence

"USA, various locations" "Egypt (childhood)" "Philippines (childhood)" "Japan (childhood)" "Baltimore, Maryland, USA (as a student)" "Michigan, USA (as a student)" "Princeton, New Jersey, USA"

Lovers(Past)

"Dominika Petrova (ex-wife)" "Stacy Warner (ex-girlfriend)" "Lisa Cuddy (ex-girlfriend)" "Allison Cameron (kissed)" "Lydia (ex-girlfriend)" "Emily (prostitute)" "Paula (prostitute)" "Karamel (stripper)" "Melodie (speed-date)" "Grace (speed-date)" "Deedee (prostitute)" "Sarah (prostitute)" "Cindy (prostitute)"

Appearance

House is a man in his late forties, early fifties with short, curly brown, greying hair. At the beginning of Season 6, House gets his head shaved or in a buzz cut that remains there for the rest of the season although it begins growing back by the end of Season 6 and through Season 7. By Season 8, during his time in prison, House's hair has grown long and he eventually shaves it off at the beginning of the Season 8 episode, Charity Case. House wears a variety of blazers, trousers and sneakers, often wearing either a button-down shirt with a t-shirt visible underneath or a button-down shirt with the top two buttons of the shirt unbuttoned, exposing his upper chest and collarbone along with jeans and sneakers. He has also been seen wearing suits and even on one rare occasion, a white Doctor's coat.

Personality

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 (although he also shows many signs of self-contempt which would be impossible for an actual narcissist) 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.

Disability #1

Putting himself into insulin shock in an attempt to get rid of his hallucinations (Under My Skin). Abusing an experimental drug compound for rats meant to regrow muscle. It was dangerous as it was never tested on humans. House later finds out from the scientist who developed the compound that the rats grew tumors and started to die. He attempted to remove the benign tumors from his leg surgically by himself, as he didn't trust the other surgeons to do it, believing they would attempt to amputate his leg. After he fails to remove the tumors himself (as the anaesthetics wear off, causing him extreme pain), Cuddy takes him to have the tumors removed by surgeons. House keeps his leg.

Patient Experiments #1

Faking brain cancer to enter a clinical trial where a drug-dispensing chip would be installed into the pleasure center of his brain. This effort was derailed when his team uncovered his deception (Half-Wit). Sticking a knife into an electrical socket to see what would happen if he was temporarily dead. Later in the episode, he asks to talk to the clinic patient who performed the same stunt earlier in the episode, but learns from Wilson that he died. Wilson asks House if he saw something, but House doesn't respond. At the end of the episode, he says "I told you so" to a dead patient who argued with House that his suffering would soon be over and he would be in heaven. (97 Seconds). Injecting himself with blood from the same batch as a sick patient to test if a blood transfusion caused his symptoms (You Don't Want To Know). Undergoing hypnosis and overdosing on the Alzheimer's medication physostigmine to unlock memories lost after a bus crash. The latter of the two put House into cardiac arrest (House's Head). Deep brain stimulation with an electrical prod to complete the missing memories. The electrical current caused a seizure, which combined with House's fractured skull to create a bleed in his brain and send him into a coma. He awoke from the coma at the end of the episode, but any damage has yet to be revealed (Wilson's Heart). He experiments with Methadone in the episode The Softer Side and becomes a nicer person. Cuddy and Wilson go to confront him on why he is acting nice, but they find him in his office, not breathing. They manage to resuscitate him in time. It is later revealed that the Methadone caused this. He then was going to quit his job because Cuddy wouldn't allow him to take Methadone, as she was worried that he was going to kill himself taking it. At the end of the episode, he decides he doesn't want to be on Methadone anymore, reasoning he couldn't do his job right because he was pain free, and therefore nicer and more oblivious to tiny details.

Patient Experiments #2

House's willingness to take risks and experiment with his patients extends to his own health. Beyond his use of Vicodin, he has frequently used himself as a guinea pig for drugs and medical tests. Some of these tests are aimed at curing his leg pain, while others are to help his patients or satisfy his own curiosity. This disregard for his own well-being horrifies Wilson and Cuddy, who see it as an expression of his self-destructive impulses. House's self-experiments include: Injecting himself with nitroglycerin to cause a migraine headache, in order to prove a rival's migraine cure was flawed, though Wilson interpreted it as House's way to forget about Stacy. He later used LSD to offset the migraine and antidepressants to nullify the LSD's more potent effects (Distractions). He was tempted to graft the pain-free spinal nerves of a teenaged CIPA patient onto his leg, but later decided against it as there was no medical justification to biopsy the nerve tissue needed and the procedure could have left the young CIPA patient paralysed. (Insensitive).

Disability #2

House is very reluctant to talk about the incident which damaged his leg and can be easily offended when it is brought up. On one occasion where he told a group of students about the leg injury, (but disguised his identity), he becomes furious when they, like his original doctors, couldn't figure out what was wrong. House is very sensitive of the appearance of his right thigh — it is badly scarred from the operations he has had. Both Cuddy and Dr. 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.

Disability #3

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, which resulted in 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. His dependence on the drug has gotten him into trouble on several occasions, and his colleagues are unsure whether House's anti-social personality traits are the result of his addiction, his pain, or actual personality.

Biography #1

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. 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 he 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.

Biography #2

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. 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.

Higher Education

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 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.)

Sexuality

Straight Ally/Questioning(Head Cannon)