Rating: 
Summary: an absolute MUST for any pre-med or med student
Review: An outstanding book chronicaling the lives of interns, based on Beth Isreal hospital in Boston. Offers a tragicomical look at the business of healthcare and the running of a hospital from the perspective of the interns. Read this if you are interested in medicine or pursuing a career in medicine...
Rating: 
Summary: a view from the trenches
Review: I have just past the midway point of my internship at a very busy public hospital filled w/ incredibly sick patients. It has definitely been the most difficult year of my life. I have been hearing about the House of God since I was a pre-med, and I read about the first 50 pages when I was a 2nd year in medical school. At that time, I wasn't too impressed. I mean Shem is no Hemmingway. But now that I've picked it up again, I must say that reading this book has been a redemptive experience. Not only because it is true (apparently very little has changed since the 70s) and because I can relate personally to everything in it (except the sex w/ nurses), but because, like anything else, there is more than one truth to being an intern. Shem's happens to be incredibly cynical, but also exactly what I need at this moment. This past six months I have been privvy to too much suffering: my patients', my peers', my significant others', my own. The House helps me to see the absurdity of it all, and that is worth a lot.
Rating:
Summary: If You Like Black Humor, Read This Book
Review: Since I am not a medical professional, I certainly cannot comment on the accuracy of Shem's book. But, as a member of an ethnic group that values black humor I can testify that this one hilarious title.The characters are interns in an urban teaching hospital. As such they are under pressure no human should have to endure. Their response is to laugh, darkly. In my opinion if they hadn't laughed they'd have lost their minds. There are so many wonderful characters--the Fat Man, the resident who knows all, Little Otto, "whose name still rings no bells ding, ding in Stockholm." I'm not explaining Little Otto to you; go read the book. _The House of God_ was written in the 1970's and is a product of that time. Shem needs to revise the book to tell the world what horrors managed care has brought to the lives of overworked and underpaid interns and residents. I have my suspicion that wrangling with insurance companies has tripled their insane workload. If you are fortunate enough to be under the care of a good physician, read this if only to appreciate how damn hard they work.
Rating:
Summary: Good But Not Best
Review: This is now a hallowed classic, yes it's dated (set in the 70s) but that doesn't stop the impact and the occasional period point (like the sexual promiscuity) is easily overlooked. I met Shem (a pseudoname)in the 80s at a meeting (he's a psychiatrist from Boston) and although I'm sure other reviewers have met him as well, he was very much full of himself with us. Most of us were not impressed....especially since he was not open to any criticisms of either his book or the issues surrounding patient care failings of the American health care system. That said, the book should be required reading for anyone serious about a medical career. But you should read better stuff as well....start with any poem or story by John Stone, William Carlos Williams' Doctor Stories, Richard Selzer's books (especially Letters To A Young Doctor), and Jay Katz' The Silent World of Doctor and Patient.
Rating:
Summary: Laws of the House of God (and GOMERs *do* go to ground)
Review: I read *The House of God* the year after I completed my own internship, while running a rural clinic (a la NORTHERN EXPOSURE, but back during the Carter Administration) and contending with the first onslaught of Managed Money (also known as Mangled Care). It was strange. I recognized the unarguable truth of the Laws of the House of God, and knew the Fat Man and Jo (the Journal Club Maniac) and all the slurpers and sleazebags and "physician entrepreneurs" for whom I'd spent a year of my life doing scut while salvaging their patients. I couldn't stop laughing through the first half of the book, and then a curious thing happened. The second half of the novel left me more and more depressed, remembering the bleakness and pain of that year, and summoning up the hard lessons I had learned -- and was still learning as a young physician in the first years of practice. It reminded me that no matter what I did, the slurpers and the self-righteous stuffed shirts in my profession were going to win. They were going to keep on degrading and destroying patients and their families, gorging on the increasing wealth being poured into "the health care industry," and beating the hell out of decent physicians who actually dared give a damn about the humanity of the people who come to us for treatment. And now, nearly three decades later, the laughs are completely gone and the truth is beyond concealment. *The House of God* is a wonderful glimpse of life as a scutpuppy back in the '70s, yes -- but more than that, it's a prophetic anticipation of the destruction of what was once a pretty decent profession, working to achieve something more than a favorable return on investment. The '70s weren't "the good old days" by any stretch of the imagination, but who could've believed back then that the 21st Century was going to be so godawfully much worse?
Rating:
Summary: House of God?
Review: Samuel Shem gives the reader a hysterical, yet frightening view of life as an intern. The deeds and misdeeds of the new doctors at times border on the incredulous, yet demonstrate the irony of the hospital titled House of God. For it is not an institution filled with white-coated divinities, but with people. Humans, who cannot, try as they might, separate themselves from their backgrounds, biases, sexual desires, emotional needs, mistakes---their humanness.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: The zany humor highlights the amazing ability of Shem to create believable charactors. I read this book once a year whether I need it or not. I would suggest anyone, especially in the medical field, read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: only for medical freshmen
Review: the author makes only a few good remarks on medical education and training. The books tries to hard to be humouristic and lacks the real cynicism and sarcasm that comes after a decade working in medicine.
Rating:
Summary: The real deal if you're in medicine, scary for the layman
Review: There are all kinds of things I hate about this book. I hate remembering how long I would go without sleep and the psychic torture that an internship inflicts on you. I hated the depersonalization of patients. I hated the sexual escapades. Most of all, I hated having in print the real feelings of an intern who has been up for three days - praying on the way to the ER that that Nursing Home Gomer with 20 fatal diagnoses would have the decency to croak before you got there so you could get an extra five minutes of sleep or a stale doughnut before the cafeteria closed again. Shem portrays masterfully the jumble of emotions of a typical intern. There is a superficial level of glossy brown-nosing that got you into med school in the first place. Buzz words like compassion, continuity of care and empathy are used with the teaching physicians and in meetings. Then there is a deeper level of survival where you would kill your mother for 5 minutes of sleep or being able to crap without the code blue pager going off. This level is usually not discussed or written about in many of the typical intern coming-of-age books out there. Not because it isn't true, but because it's uncomfortable and offensive to non-physicians. Shem is the master of this level of medical thinking. No one else even comes close. Shem approaches but doesn't quite get to an even more primal level - that of duty. This level is what keeps an intern from punching his residency directors or the arrogant surgeon who asks him "What is the difference between a sh*thead and a brown-noser" and then tells you the answer is depth perception.(True story) It's what makes you do your best when you know the patient is hopeless or even abusive as you try your best to save them from themselves or some disease. The humor is black as night and the sex is soft-core porn, according to my nephew in medical school to whom I sent a copy of this book. House of God has two profound themes. The first is a detailed description of medicine and medical training. This theme is presented with black humor, and some (but not as much as you think) exaggeration. I have read nothing that does this better. The second theme of the book is universal, however. It is the theme of Man vs. World and the World wins, but the Man is too maimed to know it. The book still disturbs and haunts me because Shem puts in print graphically and eloquently some of the thoughts and occurences that we don't even admit to ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: Fatman was right.
Review: Granted the book is exaggerated but I can find no book that catches the flavor of existential angst of internship as well as House of God does. I go back to it (and the movie) like it is an old friend, the only one that truly understands what I go through daily as an attending physician. Yes, folks, it doesn't get much better beyond internship! There is a lot of denial amongst doctors which leads to alienation. Shem is probably one of the few who have given us the truth. Medicine is a hard path to take in life and much has changed since managed care took over. I wish another Samuel Shem would come along to write a Revisited contemporary version of House of God in which the doctors are played by the patient's insurance representatives. They would go on daily rounds discussing how they can refuse every test, medication or procedure that their patient requests. In this revised House of God, the real doctors never see their patients because they have to spend all their time down in medical records filling out endless insurance forms and complying with federal regulations. Fatman would be very happy.
| 
