The House of God Quotes

“The patient is the one with the disease”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Life's like a penis; When it's soft you can't beat it; When it's hard you get screwed. - The Fat Man, Medical Resident in The House of God”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Every intern makes mistakes. The important thing is neither to make the same mistakes twice nor to make a whole bunch of mistakes all at once.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“It's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading and yet is so valued by society”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Basch: So why don't you ask her out?

The Runt: I'm scared she wouldn't like me and say no.

-So what? What have you got to lose?

-The possibility -if she says no- that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Law XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“LAWS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD I Gomers don’t die. II Gomers go to ground. III At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse. IV The patient is the one with the disease. V Placement comes first. VI There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a #14 needle and a good strong arm. VII Age + BUN = Lasix dose. VIII They can always hurt you more. IX The only good admission is a dead admission. X If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever. XI Show me a BMS who only triples my work and I will kiss his feet. XII If the radiology resident and the BMS both see a lesion on the chest X ray, there can be no lesion there. XIII The delivery of medical care is to do as much nothing as possible.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“This is the basic human story. We are all on the same journey. Every one of us will suffer—there’s no way around it. The crucial question is not how to avoid suffering, it’s how we move through it.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“I make them feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don’t hardly exist at all. With me, they feel they’re still part of the human race.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“I realized with alarm that I hadn’t learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“The main source of illness in this world is the doctor’s own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“I found myself thinking of Potts as a tragic figure, a guy who'd been a happy towheaded kid you'd love to take fishing with you, who'd mistakenly invested in academic medicine when he'd have been happy in his family business, and who'd become a splattered mess on the parking lot of a hospital in a city he'd despised. What had been the seductiveness of medicine? Why?”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the long ago, before birth.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Each of us was becoming more isolated. The more we needed support, the more shallow were our friendships; the more we needed sincerity, the more sarcastic we became. It had become an unwritten law among the terns: don’t tell what you feel, ’cause if you show a crack, you’ll shatter. We imagined that our feelings could ruin us, like the great silent film stars had been ruined by sound.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“It’s our job to tell them that imperfect health is and always has been perfect health, and that most of the things that go wrong with their bodies we can’t do much about. So maybe we do make diagnoses; big deal. We hardly ever cure.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“To look forward to whatever flowed through the doors. To save a life? Two lives? I felt proud. The burden of treating the intractable, untreatable, unplaceable, unwanted, had been replaced by the fantasy of being a real doctor, dealing with real disease.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Talking about medicine, I told him with bitterness about my growing cynicism about what I could do, and he said, “No, we don’t cure. I never bought that either. I went through the same cynicism—all that training, and then this helplessness. And yet, in spite of all our doubt, we can give something. Not cure, no. What sustains us is when we find a way to be compassionate, to love. And the most loving thing we do is to be with a patient, like you are being with me.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“This might have been the only thing that could have awakened you. Your whole life has been a growing from the outside, mastering the challenges that others have set for you. Now, finally, you might just be growing from inside yourself.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Of course not. People expect perfect health. It’s a brand-spanking-new Madison Avenue expectation. It’s our job to tell them that imperfect health is and always has been perfect health, and that most of the things that go wrong with their bodies we can’t do much about. So maybe we do make diagnoses; big deal. We hardly ever cure.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“And who were we, anyway, to imagine we knew what these gomers felt, to be so hot on saving them? Wasn't it ridiculous for us to imagine that they felt as we did? As ridiculous as it would be for us to try to imagine what a child felt? We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the one long ago, before birth. Wouldn't that be a death, for them?”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“LOL in NAD: Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress; not a GOMERE.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“GOMER: Get Out of My Emergency Room; “a human being who has lost—often through age—what goes into being a human being” (the Fat Man).”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“You can’t save us,” I said, “you can’t stop the process. That’s why we’re going into psychiatry: we’re trying to save ourselves.” “From what?” “FROM BEING JERKS WHO’D LOOK UP TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU!” screamed the Runt. “What?” asked the Leggo shakily, “what are you saying?” I felt that he was trying to understand, and I knew he couldn’t but that he was crying inside because we’d pushed the button that had him hearing the tapes of all his failings, as father and son, and I said as kindly as possible, “What we’re saying is that the real problem this year hasn’t been the gomers, it’s been that we didn’t have anyone to look up to.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“what I had to live with, the rest of the world must never see, for it separated me from them, as it had just done with my former best friends and with my one long love, Berry. There was rage and rage and rage, coating all like crude oil coating gulls. They had hurt me, bad. For now, I had no faith in the others of the world. And the delivery of medical care? Farce. BUFF ’n’ TURF. Revolving door. I wasn’t sitting at the end of the ambulance ride, no. There was no glamour in this. My first patient of the New Year was a five-year-old found in a clothes dryer, face bloodied. She had been hit by her pregnant mother, hit over and over with a bludgeon of pantyhose stuffed with shards of broken glass. How could I survive?”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Sometimes, drunk, I ruminate on the state of my liver, and think of all the cirrhotics I have watched turn yellow and die. They either bleed out, raving, coughing up and drowning in blood from ruptured esophageal veins, or, in coma, they slip away, slip blissfully away down the yellow-brick ammonia-scented road to oblivion.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God