The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it does for medical training what Catch-22 did for the military life—displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors. In a sense The House of God is more outrageous than Catch-22, since the military has long attracted (indeed, has forcibly drafted) detractors and satirists, whereas medical practitioners as represented in fiction are generally benign, often heroic, and at worst of drolly dubious efficacy, like the enthusiastic magus Hofrat Behrens of Thomas Mann’s The
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