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    The House of God
    The House of God
    The House of God
    Audiobook14 hours

    The House of God

    Written by Samuel Shem, M.D.

    Narrated by Sean Runnette

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative journey that takes us into the lives of Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country. Young Dr. Basch and his irreverant confident, known only as the Fat Man, will learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings.

    Samuel Shem has done what few in American medicine have dared to do-create an unvarnished, unglorified, and amazingly forthright portrait revealing the depth of caring, pain, pathos, and tragedy felt by all who spend their lives treating patients and stand at the crossroads between science and humanity.

    With over two million copies sold worldwide, The House of God has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels of the twentieth century and compared to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith for its poignant portrayal of the education of American doctors.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 27, 2011
    ISBN9781452674414
    The House of God

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    Reviews for The House of God

    4/5

    317 ratings23 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Raunchy, funny, and heartbreaking. A read that's more philosophy than medicine and trust me that's not a bad thing!
    • 4/5
      Read this book when it first came out. Was working as a nurse in a large teaching hospital, and Level 1 trauma center, at the time. I found it refreshingly funny as did the staff who also read it. It's exactly as described, irreverent, satirical black humor. (We were fully aware of patients as human beings deserving of respect and the best we had to give, regardless of diagnosis or personality.)

      This book is obviously a satire, poking fun at the life (or lack thereof) of residents 40-odd years ago.

      Satire:

      | sa tī (ē)r |

      NOUN
      the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
    • 5/5
      Related to the story, both, deeply & hilariously. Fantastic read/listen for anyone in the medical community!
    • 4/5
      Loved the humor, over the top and with a lot of personality. (Often crude.) Shem clearly had fun writing this. The story lacks momentum, so it was easy to put down. But overall, the unique setting and attitude made the novel worth reading. >‘In New York once,’ said Fats, ‘we had a contest to see how long the medical service could go without an admission. Thirty-seven hours. You shoulda seen what we sent outta there. Roy, help them. Be a WALL.’
    • 3/5
      I know this book is considered bible-ish in the medical community but I found it so sexist it was hard to read and mostly absurd. It took me a year to get through because I just didn’t want to read it.
    • 4/5
      Shem's fictionalized memoir, recounting his year as an intern in a major Boston hospital, is by turns dark and depressing and cynical and ribald and wildly funny. Set against the final days of Richard Nixon's presidency, the disintegration of a formerly powerful man is reflected in the increasingly fractured and disintegrating medical intern training system of the day. Urged to "do everything possible for every patient, every time", Shem's Roy Basch and his fellow internal medicine interns are faced with aging patients whose lives can be extended, but not improved, by the medical procedures the system (and their superiors) insist they perform. And while the elderly and often demented patients are not permitted the final rest they seek (to the extent that they are capable of seeking anything), Basch's younger patients have a horrifying tendency to expire, either from the underlying conditions that brought them to the hospital or from botched treatments that harmed instead of helped. Battling an increasingly heavy burden of despair, Basch tries everything from long-distance running to wild bouts of casual sex to utter withdrawal from emotional involvement, with varying levels of success.He's not alone on his journey, as the novel is also filled with sharp and involving characters, including two of the most unlikely cops ever to appear on the printed page.How he survives the year and begins the healing that will ultimately save him, makes an often fascinating, often troublesome, always compelling read.
    • 2/5
      This book has special resonance with medical residents, and people close to them. It wasn't written for me, someone not in the medical field. Given that, I was still struck by how juvenile it was, slapping back and forth between trying to shock the reader with sexual/medical descriptions and a pretty basic exploration of the psychological components of resident training during the 1970's (an abusive environment, echos of which still exist today). I was hoping to get an honest assessment of the book's place in history and it's shortcomings/successes in the afterward written by the author in 2010, but instead just got some self-congratulatory statements about how important the book is and how we should all read his new book. Bummer.Taken as a work of fiction - the main character is unlikable and largely survives the book without any character growth, just changes in circumstance. The character's biggest flaws, his treatment of underlings and women alike as disposable paper-thin characterizations, are not explored in any depth. Everyone more important than the main character is wrong, incompetent, or both; everyone at the character's level is flawed in more obvious and unfixable ways; and everyone below the characters level doesn't exist as anything more than a pair of tits or a set of hands pushing a wheelchair. Possible exception to this - Fat Man.
    • 3/5
      This was entertaining......curious as to how out of date it is, regarding the experience of interns. I didn't necessarily love the style of the writing. It reminded me of a weak attempt to write in the style of Catcher in the Rye (a book which I ultimately dislike but which does have a distinct voice). I agree with one review that I read who commented that this book made her think "so what?" What he seems to present as being "shocking" about the treatment of the ill and the dehumanization of the elderly doesn't have nearly as much punch to it as I believe the author expects. Perhaps because the medical field is no longer on the same pedestal that it was when the book was written? Regardless, I enjoyed this but wouldn't read it again. And I would be reluctant to recommend it to someone unless I really knew what they liked in a book.
    • 1/5
      Not funny, crude, disrespectful of patients, horribly exaggerated
    • 3/5
      Detailed description of medicine and medical training presented with black humor is fascinating. Gives a sense of the cynicism inherent in the health care system. The soft-core porn is just a little too over the top -- every boy's fantasy.
    • 4/5
      This is an example of the benefits of stepping out of one's comfort zone. If one of my coworkers (who was a nurse in the 70s) had not lent me this book, I never ever would have picked it up. It is exactly as it proclaims to be on the cover - the "Catch 22" of medicine. It is a hilarious satire of life in a modern hospital, where the extremely elderly can be artificially kept alive forever, but athletic 30-year-old fathers still die of heart attacks. As you can imagine, it is very dark. The characters are phenomenal (if a little dated), from the genius black sidekick and the horny nurse to the policemen who speak like Harvard professors and the bitter workaholic female resident.It wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed it and it's helped me understand my coworkers a little better. Highly recommended, at least if you don't usually read this sort of thing.
    • 4/5
      Dr. Sanja Gupta had the author of this book on his show and highly recommended the book as a classic, especially for medical interns. Of course, things haven't changed - they have only gotten worse in terms of not letting people die without overwhelming medical intervention.
    • 4/5
      I read this book when I was a medical student in the early 1980s (mandatory read for any medical student or resident). A very acerbic view of life as an intern in a large hospital but unfortunately it rings true. I got to meet the author in person last night as he gave a lecture at the UCF medical school.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my favorit books. It is set in a hospital and deals with a lot of medical problems. But in contains wisdom which is useful in millions of other areas, especially the Zebra Rule: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras"
    • 4/5
      Reading this book during my 3rd year of medical school was cathartic; however, I don't know if I'd recommend it to anyone outside the medical profession. It's crass, irreverent, explicit, and cynical - but it validated a lot of what I had been feeling and experiencing in the hospital environment, and there is a good dose of humanity that comes through. To anyone who is in medicine - a great read.
    • 4/5
      The Catch 22 book for med students. Written in the '70s, he says his mission was to change the inhumanity and cynicism he experienced as a med student, and decided the only way was to write a satiric novel. My daughter (now a doctor) loved it because it was (still) so true to life - for me it was profoundly depressing for this very reason.
    • 4/5
      On first picking up the book & reading the Introduction I thought I'd have a lot of trouble reading this, and that I wasn't going to enjoy it at all. However, I found it very easy to read once I got started, although initially I thought it quite disgusting, a bit too ribald and bitter. After a while I found I was beginning to feel compassion for the interns despite their cynical treatment of the gomers. Ultimately, the 'terns bitterness is unsurprising and I can see that suicide might be quite prevalent for those unable to cope.Definitely well worth reading. I'd like to read it again some day as it's worth a second viewing, I think. I'd probably get a laugh out of it the 2nd time even though I'm not a part of that medical fraternity.
    • 4/5
      Reading House of God used to be a rite of passage for medical students and residents in days gone by. I wonder, is it still serving that function? Black humor about hospitals and doctors. Oh yes, and the patients, too. Despite the outrageousness of the book, there are kernels of truth behind many episodes. There is some wisdom within as well, such as, "The longer you stay, the longer you stay." Some great words of advice that go beyond responding to an arrest - "Always walk into the room." Yes, it is not a flattering view of medicine, but for those who have experienced medical training, it reflects the dark humor that is often necessary to deal with it all. If you are in medicine, I recommend reading it despite its less than flattering view of our profession.
    • 5/5
      A great book. So original. Might be made into a great movie. It probably already has been. This book helped me get started collecting books by doctors.
    • 4/5
      And finally another reread, Samuel Shem’s House of God. As a brand new medical student, I was assigned, fresh-faced and wide-eyed, to an adult intensive care unit as a ‘taster’ to counter-balance the dry lectures and tutorials that characterise the first couple of years of medical training.With no specialist knowledge at all, we were daunted by the onslaught of highly technical and intense terminology and concepts in the ICU, and the consultant knew it. He told us that he didn’t care if we didn’t turn up, he didn’t care if we learnt anything in particular from him during the four weeks we were scheduled to attend the unit intermittently. What he did ask each of us to do though was to read this book, and to take it all in. It is still one of the most useful pieces of teaching I have ever been given.Shem’s House of God is the tale of a group of medical interns in the 70s, working in an affluent Jewish-founded hospital – the House of the title – in the US. His description of the realities of what it was like to be a junior doctor was considered shocking at the time – in the new introduction to the book, John Updike says it does for medicine what Catch-22 did for war, and that’s not far from the truth. Shem’s story is at least in part semi-autobiographical (the House of God is probably the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel hospital in Boston), and that gives it the ring of truth, as the main character. Roy Basch, traces a parabola from eager young doctor all the way down to the depths of despair, beaten down by the system, and his ascent back out of the other side. Like all of these sorts of books – Jed Mercurio’s Cardiac Arrest TV series and his novel Bodies are the UK equivalent – the depths are deeper than most of us experience, but the flavour of it all rings absolutely true.It is no exaggeration to say that amongst the many people in my life that have coloured the sort of doctor that I have become, the character of the Fat Man in this book is one of them. He charts a path between the necessary desensitisation to the often horrific realities of medical practice whilst still being tempered with genuine compassion and ability to see the human effects of what is done that served – and still does – as a role model. The consultant who insisted we read this book knew exactly what he was doing, and it is advice I have gladly repeated to medical students since I became responsible for helping to train them. For the non-medic it offers an insight into a particular time and place – around Basch, America is reeling from the Watergate scandal - but also a timeless description of the other side of medical care. Shem’s language has coloured all of those who came after – ‘bounce and turf’ are now standard medical terms, as are GOMERs and LOLs in NAD, and the Fat Man’s ‘Laws of the House of God’ are familiar to many who’ve never read the book.Anyway, despite the fact that it's undoubtedly had some influence on me, it's been a long time since I've actually reread it. Doing so was prompted by the fact that I lent my copy to some bugger ages ago, who has not returned it, and I now can't remember who it was; and I saw it in a 3 for 2 offer in a bookshop. So I bought myself a new copy, which led me to reread it. It still stands up. Its vision is too dark - most of us find our own way through with far less trauma, but it nonetheless still resonates on every level.
    • 5/5
      I came across The House of God while I was an internal medicine resident in September, 1978 when it was first published. I can still remember leafing through it in the bookstore and laughing out loud. I could not believe that someone had actually put into writing the things my fellow residents and interns secretly joked about to relieve our stress. It has since become the bible for all medical professionals. I can't recommend it enough to all readers, not just doctors, nurses, and physician's assistants. It is the funniest book I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      One of the two funniest books I have ever read. (The other is Catch-22.) Do not read it before or during a hospital visit.
    • 2/5
      Was worth reading when you didn't have Scrubs, ER, Gray's Anatomy... kind of depressing, much like real residency.