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The House of God by Samuel Shem
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The House of God Quotes Showing 1-30 of 55

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Law XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE"
― 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

"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: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

"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

"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

"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

"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

"You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all."
― 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: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

"Key concept," said the Fat Man, "to think that you're doing a shitty job. If you resign yourself to doing a shitty job, you go ahead and get the job done, and since we're all in the ninety-ninth percentile of interns, at one of the best ternships in the world, what you do turns out to be a terrific job, a superlative job. Don't forget that four out of every ten interns in America can't speak English."
― 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

"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: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

"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: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

"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. It can be a whole new world, Roy, I know it. A whole new life." Eyes wet with tears, she said, "I'm going to love you even more, Roy, because I've been waiting a long time for you to begin."
― Samuel Shem, The House of God: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

"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

"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

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