by Joe Miller
The other day, my wife sent me a screenshot of a social media post that read:
“I’m rewatching House and [expletive] this show is bananas. They just let this man limp around doing medical crimes all day every day including Christmas.”
Caroline and I mostly enjoy the same television programs. House, M.D. is one of our few disagreements. She hated the show. It’s one of my all-time favorites.
For those of you not familiar with the show, its central conceit is that Dr. Gregory House – a misanthropic genius – leads a small team of doctors who take on cases that no one else can figure out. It’s a fairly standard premise for a medical procedural.
And if you watch the show as a medical procedural, it is in fact bananas. House and his team do all kinds of things that would – at a minimum – cost them their license to practice medicine, if not outright land them in prison.
My interpretation is that House is a lot less bananas if you think of it as a police procedural that’s only pretending to be a medical procedural.
I think that at this point, it’s mostly common knowledge that Dr. House is a play on Sherlock Holmes. (House, Holmes. Get it?)
If you’re worried the name is just a coincidence, there are other hints. The pilot episode of House features a patient named Adler. At the end of season 2, House is nearly killed by a man named Moriarty. House lives at 221B, is a talented amateur musician and has a drug addiction that worsens when he is bored.
Irene Adler is the only criminal ever to outsmart Sherlock Holmes, the detective who lives at 221B Baker Street, plays the violin, injects cocaine when between cases and nearly dies at Richenbach Falls in a confrontation with Professor Moriarty.
Other references are more subtle.
In the fifth season episode “Joy to the World,” House’s best friend, Dr. Wilson (Watson) quotes from the Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The B plot of the episode revolves around a first edition medical text Wilson had purchased for House as a Christmas gift. The work in question: A Manual on the Operations of Surgery by Dr. Joseph Bell.
That’s a real book, by a real physician.
Bell was a Scottish surgeon who practiced and taught medicine in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was an early pioneer of what we now call forensic pathology, and Bell consulted with Scotland Yard on several investigations, including Jack the Ripper.
Bell was mostly famous for his ability to pick out a total stranger and infer their occupation and recent activities simply by observing them carefully. One of his students wrote that Bell could “diagnose people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths,” and that “He would tell them their symptoms and even give them details of their past life, and hardly ever would he make a mistake.”
The medical student who penned those words: Arthur Conan Doyle, who worked as Bell’s outpatient clerk before leaving his medical career to make a career as a writer.
Doyle based detective Sherlock Holmes on Dr. Joseph Bell. House turns detective Holmes back into a physician.
House shares Holmes’ and Bell’s knack for correct inferences drawn from careful observation. We frequently see House correctly diagnose patients before they even speak.
Unlike Bell, House is usually wrong at least once about his case of the week—though he almost always gets it right in the end.
Sherlock Holmes calls his conclusions deductions. But that’s not quite right. Deductive arguments take forms like:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Notice that if the first two claims (what logicians call premises) are true, then the conclusion has to be true. That is, the only way Socrates could be immortal would be for him to be something other than a man or for there to be some immortal men. Deductive arguments are always like that. If the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true.
House’s conclusions from careful observation don’t work that way. When he sees a clinic patient wearing beat up running shoes, carrying a bridal magazine and complaining of leg pain, House tells her to buy better shoes and run fewer miles. He has guessed (correctly) that her wedding is approaching, that she’s exercising more to ensure she looks good in her wedding dress and that she’s been too busy to buy new shoes.
But this conclusion doesn’t follow in the same way that Socrates’ mortality does. House’s patient could have fallen off a chair and twisted her knee. That could be true even if she really is getting married soon and really is wearing beat up running shoes.
House’s conclusions (like Bell’s and Holmes’) are based on inductive reasoning. Inductive arguments make their conclusions more likely, but not necessarily certain.
Induction is the type of reasoning used in science, in medicine and in detective work.
It’s also what I’m doing right now in concluding that I’ve spent far too many words talking about a television show that left the air 13 years ago.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
