Samuel Shem

Intern Roy Basch becomes disillusioned with the medical establishment when he sees his fellow interns fall for the illusions that destroy a doctor's ability to relate to and really care for his patients. Reprint.

The House of God

Gavin

Updikean satire, more delightful than funny. Its surrealism, puns (Mrs Risenshein, an LOL in NAD [litle old lady in no obvious distress]), sexual glibness earn it a right to sentimentality in the face of human filth and pain:

  
We fought. She probably knew we were fighting about Dr. Sanders’s long dying and about the illusion in my father’s letters and about my plethora of absent role models and the blossoming idea that the gomers were not our patients but our adversaries, and most of all we were fighting over the guilt that I felt for having Molly in a dark corner of the ward standing up, this Molly, who, like me, wouldn’t stop and think and feel either, because if she ruminated on what she felt about enemas and emesis basins, she’d lose faith even in her centipede and want to kill herself too. Our fight was not the violent, howling, barking fight that keeps alive vestiges of love, but that tired, distant, silent fight where the fighters are afraid to punch for fear the punch will kill. So this is it, I thought dully, four months into the internship and I’ve become an animal, a mossbrained moose who did not and could not and would not think and talk, and it’s come like an exhausted cancerous animal to my always love, my buddy Berry, and me–yes it’s come to us: Relationship On Rocks...

Shem's dialogue is pleasurable - the Flann O'Joyce variety of brainy silliness. His two eloquent Irish cops are the best people in the book:

  "Top o' the morning to you, brave Sergeant Finton Gilheeney."
"Is it the Commissioner?"
"None other. The young doctor says that with the aid of an operation, with the usefulness of the scalpel being demonstrated, you will survive." 
"-Dr Basch, I believe that I now have no need of the last rites. If so, could the priest depart? He scares me in the memory of how close to heaven or that hot other place I came."
"-And is there a message for the little woman, the wife?" the Commissioner asked as the priest left...
"Ah well, all the best boyo, and I'm on my way to your wife and will soothe her with my boyish good looks and TV-cop mien. Good-bye, and for the young scholar here who saved your fine red life, SHALOM and God bless."
Savage, all of it, savage.

Like any psychologically ambitious work of the mid-C20th, it has a lot of Freud in it, much of it going unchallenged. The book is also about the distress and pain of an extremely lucky and insulated and remunerated man surrounded by women who do massive amounts for him, but you mostly forget this, it is that good. 

I imagine there are still pockets of people out there who still believe in the 1950s George Clooney heroism and omnicompetence of doctors. So Shem, hot-shot prof at BMS, and his book have work to do.


[Theory #2, Values #2]

Lenja

Tanlyn Roelofs

Mrigank

Alistair James

An intern becomes disillusioned with the medical establishment when he sees his fellow interns fall for the illusions that destroy a doctor's ability to relate to and really care for his patients.

The House of God

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