Is There A Dr Watson In The House?

The Age

Thursday April 26, 2007

Scott Murray

IN THE justly acclaimed series, House M.D., Dr Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) exhibits a genius for deduction. This is just as well because he is head of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

A typical episode begins with a quick look at the week's highlighted patient(s). House then leads his young team in trying to decipher what ails them. There will be misleading clues, false trials and a few patients and family who lie. House will treat everyone with rudeness, if not disdain, feigning interest in the mental challenge rather than the patient's welfare.

Despite the odd stumble (last week's light-sensitive child), House is way more intelligent than all around him. He has a loner's intolerance of lesser mortals, a witty but acid tongue and an often-disorienting sense of the absurd.

When not patronising his young sidekicks, or being confrontational with his female boss (is that misogyny raising its ugly head?), he may try to keep boredom at bay by playing Nintendo.

If that isn't enough, House is also a drug addict. Crippled by pain in his leg, he depends heavily on Vidicon prescribed by friend Dr James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). One suspects, though, House would use drugs even if in the peak of physical fitness.

In recent episodes, House has been pursued by a nemesis, a psychotic detective named Tritter (David Morse), who will happily use any illegal means to capture and destroy his prey. A surreal figure, Tritter feels like a figment of House's imagination, the personification perhaps of a guilty conscience.

On its US premiere on November 16, 2004, House M.D. was proclaimed a brilliant and innovative show. But studio executives must have wondered whether House's resistible charms would dangerously alienate audiences. They needn't have worried; most weeks, despite his irascible behaviour, House manages to seduce viewers into a life-affirming embrace. Like French novelist Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret, he is a mender of destinies.

Having personally come to the show very late (an April 4 repeat of episode three), it seemed that series creator David Shore had gone back in time to source his inspiration for House. Shore's inquiring mind had locked onto an enduring figure from the pulp past, one whose entrance into literature and the minds of millions is described so: "He is a little queer in his ideas - an enthusiast in some branches of science . . . I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist . . . His studies are very desultory and eccentric but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors . . . he is not a man that is easy to draw out, though he can be communicative enough when the fancy seizes him.

"Is this fellow's temper so formidable, or what is it?

"(He) is a little too scientific for my tastes - it approaches cold-bloodedness."

This brilliant man is a loner, infuriated by lesser mortals and their faulty reasoning, and savagely intolerant of anyone who does not agree with his deductions. He treats almost everyone with indifference, if not disdain, interested more in the mental challenge than the upholding of justice. Deeply misogynistic, he is known for attempting to keep boredom at bay by playing a violin.

Often, he is harassed by an evil nemesis but many think this arch villain a figment of his fevered imagination.

Discontent with the world around him, he is addicted to drugs, most famously a 7-per-cent solution of cocaine and sometimes morphine. This habit is reluctantly facilitated by his best friend, a doctor: "But consider! Count the cost! . . . a black reaction comes upon you."

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."

Surely that is Dr Gregory House speaking. But no, it is a literary creation based largely on Doctor Joseph Bell, a distinguished professor at the University of Edinburgh and Surgeon of the Edinburgh Infirmary.

One of Bell's pupils was a student named Arthur Conan Doyle. The character he invented, during quiet periods at his medical practice, was, of course, Mr Sherlock Holmes, the world's greatest consulting detective.

Shore's debt to Holmes is so great - as watching further episodes has revealed - that he graciously dots his series with reverential clues.

In the pilot, the patient is Rebecca Adler, named, no doubt, after Irene Adler. "To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman," as Dr Watson so tenderly described her.

As for the sinister Tritter, he is simply House's Professor Moriarty. ("He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web but that web has a thousand radiations and he knows well every quiver of each of them.")

Then there is the matter of House's home address. In episode 39, House and Wilson (aka Dr Watson) are briefly glimpsed leaving a residence with the number 221B. Doesn't that ring the most glorious bell?

© 2007 The Age

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