Direct quote from Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:
Give the doctor his due: The staying power of Stephen Bergman’s 1978 novel, “The House Of God,” is astonishing. (Begman published the book under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) Largely ignored when it first came out, with its author shunned by his colleagues for telling tales out of medical school, “The House of God” has since sold more than 2 million copies. It appears on med-school syllabuses and has become a cult classic in the shadowy insider world of aspiring doctors.
“The House of God” is a book to which few are indifferent. A dark, satirical bildungsroman set in the hurly-burly of Beth Israel Hospital’s emergency room, where Bergman worked as an intern, it has been dismissed – by a doctor, or course – as “a piece of trash.” John Updike loved the book and in 1995 contributed a near-fulsome introduction, comparing it quite aptly to Joseph Heller’s classic “Catch-22”; Bergman’s work “glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel,” he wrote.
My son and I confessed to each other that we didn’t read much past the iconic sex scenes in the middle of the 400-page novel. That’s OK: Updike loved the gamy parts, too. “The sex is most conspicuous,” he wrote, “an in the orgies with Angel and Molly acquires an epic size and pornographic ideality.”
But the clean parts stay with you too. Who can forget ER epithets like “LOLNAD” (Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress) or “GOMER” (Get Out of My Emergency Room), taught to the impressionable young interns by the profane, countercultural resident, the Fat Man. Said Fat Man counsels his young charges that “the only good admission is a dead admission” (because they don’t have to be turfed out of the ER to another service) and to avoid touching patients at all costs. Why? Because they are sick!
In addition to lucrative sales, Bergman and his book have something else to boast about: newfound respectability. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, Anne Hudson Jones compared “The House of God” to Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.” Bergman contributed a long article about his book to an American College of Physicians Journal last year and guesses that he has addressed more than 50 medical school commencements in the United States and Europe in the past decade.
But none in Boston, where memories are long and fuses short.
