Gregory House, Disabled Bastard, in House MD Season 1
Starting with E1: Everybody Lies. Analysing House MD S1’s approach to disability and ableism within its narrative.
House MD is one of the most shows ever made, and I love it, I think it’s great, I think it’s really fucked up.
House MD, if you are not familiar — or, more likely, if you’ve seen it posted about online but never actually watched it — is a modern day reimagining and adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
Mr Holmes, rather than being an esoteric and blatantly autistic genius consulting detective, is reincarnated in the form of Gregory House — a just as esoteric and blatantly autistic, chronically pained and irascible genius doctor, who rather than seeking out and solving general mysteries instead solves medical mysteries.
The show takes on a case of the week format, with each episode focusing on a patient or patients and their medical issues — after a few false diagnoses and unfolding drama, most episodes end with the case being solved, and along the way we see not only House’s pathos, his self-loathing and his flawed relationships, his dark and offensive humour, his tendency to self-destruct, but also those of his coworkers.
Firstly, Doctor James Wilson — where Holmes becomes House, Watson becomes Wilson, and James Wilson is House’s closest compatriot, his homoerotically intimate partner, his counterbalance, the man so insane (and yet so affable in his insanity) that he makes the genius seem almost normal at times in comparison.
Then, Doctor Lisa Cuddy — Cuddy is in some ways House’s Lestrade, although she actually has authority over the man that Lestrade never does over Holmes: Cuddy is the administrator of Princeton Plainsboro Hospital, the hospital where House is employed as a diagnostician, and many of her struggles involve trying to limit the amount of malpractice House can commit in the course of an episode.
And finally, House’s team — in the initial seasons, House’s junior coworkers are Doctor Robert Chase, Doctor Allison Cameron, and Doctor Eric Foreman, although in later seasons his team changes and evolves — and House’s team not only assist in diagnosing patients and administering treatments, but also have to deal with House’s hijinks, limiting his malpractice or joining in with it, and often engage in non-medical nonsenses in order to help solve this week’s case, whether that be breaking and entering, cooking up their own drugs, stealing, conning, or whatever delightful crime seems most fun this episode.
It’s a ridiculous premise, and just as ridiculous a show — the show itself is often glib on many levels, with House himself being edgy and making comments designed to offend as many people as possible, whether via personal insult or calling in some bigotry or other. Despite that — and in part because of that — it’s a show that actually has some really complex character writing on a lot of levels, and is a show that stands out to me as having some of the most impactful writing on disability in television that I could name.
This piece is going to focus on Season 1 of the show and delve into the ways in which Gregory House stands out as a disabled character, and how the show’s writing of his disability and his experiences being traumatised by and because of his disability speak to me as a disabled man myself. It’s not that House is a role model, because God knows he isn’t — but what he is, at many times, is relatable.
A lot of disabled people wish they could be as much of an asshole as this guy is, because frankly, the ways in which disabled people are constantly policed for their negative feelings about both disability and the ways in which people pathologise and treat disabled people, is infuriating. You’re meant to constantly be grateful for the crumbs people forget to put out for you, not considering your access needs, muttering about your “quality of life” as a euphemism for effectively wishing you were euthanised so they won’t have to deal with you any longer.
Gregory House is a prick, but his behaviour doesn’t come from nowhere, and seeing the ways in which his relationship with pain and trauma play out in his ability to connect — or not — with people is endlessly fascinating and entertaining to me on rewatch after rewatch.
First things first: how is Gregory House disabled?
I would argue that House has 3 different definitions to his own disability across the length of the series, loosely defined as they are:
House’s leg. House had a significant piece of necrotic muscle tissue removed from his thigh prior to the show. This has left him chronically in pain due to the scar tissue, and as there is no longer sufficient muscle tissue to fully support his weight, his mobility is significantly affected. Subsequently, House walks with a cane, and takes medication to manage his chronic pain.
House’s neurodivergence. Gregory House is autistic. I’ll talk more about the whys and wherefores later — the show tries to say that he’s “not autistic, just an asshole,” but in fact, he’s both. I would probably argue that House is coded ADHD and autistic (much like the original Sherlock Holmes), as his constant sense of understimulation and boredom being so painful is relatable as Hell, but House also has significant childhood and adult trauma, and this also impacts the ways in which he thinks, emotes, and relates to others.
House’s addiction. Some people might argue that addiction isn’t a disability — those people are presumably comfortable being wrong, so let them live their lives in ignorance. Apart from the physical and psychological ways in which pharmacological addiction wreaks havoc with one’s ability to manage pain and the side effects of one’s medication as one becomes accustomed to it, the social model of disability — namely, the idea that many issues disabled people experience are not necessarily caused by our disabilities themselves, but by additional barriers put in our way by society and people’s responses to our disability — addiction is most certainly disabling. House is in many ways more disabled by his addiction precisely because of the US’ “War on Drugs”, the politics of which greatly impacts both individual and medically institutional responses to addiction. While many other characters heavily pathologise and demonise House’s addictive tendencies and specifically his vicodin addiction, I do agree that House is an addict — but him being an addict is far less a problem than people’s desire to cure him of addiction, thereby rendering him “good” again.
Full Essay breaking down 1×01: Everybody Lies here.
