Chris Bryant | On 02, May 2018

Meet Gregory House, M.D.. He’s a brilliant, misanthropic doctor working at Princeton Plainsboro hospital. He picks out only cases that interest him and has little time for patient comfort: he’s only there to solve the puzzle.

His motto, and his show’s tagline (Everybody Lies), suggests that he’s not a people person. His underhanded, efficient but near-sadistic methods extend to his friends (well, his one friend) and colleagues too.

We inspect the rarest diseases, oddest symptoms and outrageous medical practices from the manipulative genius’ archives. From background notes to what morals and laws were violated to diagnose them, we present the VODzilla.co Gregory House Medical Chart.

Warning: This may contain some distressing images.

Rabies (Season 1, Episode 10)

Patient

Victoria Madsen, a homeless woman, is discovered, delusional, at a house party with a book of sketches. There’s some doubt as to whether she’s faking the symptoms, especially from Foreman.

Symptoms
Localised numbness, light sensitivity, disorientation, paranoia, ineffectiveness of sedatives, hydrophobia.

House Moment
House tries to bribe a police officer into admitting he tazed Victoria. Medically relevant – ethically awful.

Eureka Moment
Victoria is tazed twice leading House to suspect rabies. To be certain, he sticks a needle in Foreman’s arm where she bit him to test the numbness.

Weird science?
7/10

An extremely well-known disease, with less than ten human cases in the last twenty years. Victoria did manage to retain some of the most commonly recognisable symptoms so House’s thought process wasn’t too unbelievable.

Anthrax & Leprosy (Season 1, Episode 13)

Patient
After a Ouija board condemns him, Gabe Reilich comes down with what appears to be pneumonia.

Symptoms
Strained breathing, fever, rejection of antibiotic medicine, necrosis, skin lesions, localised paralysis.

House Moment
Any moment in which House is forced to deal with Gabe’s father, a wealthy ex-pilot who financially supports the hospital. Worried for his son, his fear translates as telling House what to do. This doesn’t always go as he plans.

Eureka Moment
The anthrax is discovered through routine testing: House notices Gabe’s father’s supposed carpal tunnel surgery didn’t work, leading him to press him on his travels to Asia, where his trust in local medicine lead him to contract dormant leprosy.

Weird science?
9/10

Anthrax and leprosy are both well-known, though very rare. But to have anthrax that activates dormant leprosy? That’s just bad luck. House managed to guess it purely from a comment about diseases from South East Asia though, proving his odd, incomparable brilliance.

Methanol Poisoning & Pheochromocytoma (Season 2, Episode 1)

Patient
Clarence (guest star LL Cool J) has visions of his victims while on Death Row. House is interested and decides to help him get healthy again before his execution.

Symptoms
Hallucinations, dehydration, intermittent adrenal secretion.

House Moment
House seems perpetually accepting of the murderer, until putting him in an MRI machine which contains a powerful magnet pulls the heavy metals in his prison tattoos out of his skin.

Eureka Moment
House begins to wonder about the motive behind Clarence’s murders in prison, noticing an anomaly.

Weird Science?
7.5/10

A brutal – if inaccurate – scene involving iron-based prison tattoos in an MRI machine earns points, as does House’s treatment for methanol poisoning: a bottle of rum. A tumour that causes bursts of strength and anger is nearly as cool as LL Cool J, too.

Gold Poisoning (Season 2, Episode 15)

Patient
Bob is brought in after breathing issues mid-sex with his wife Samantha. All symptoms point to heavy metal poisoning, but no treatment works. Eventually, House begins to suspect Bob’s wife of poisoning him.

Symptoms
Swollen tongue, stifled breathing, pain in lower extremities, kidney failure, severe lung damage.

House Moment
During the big reveal, House uses chemistry to almost literally catch Samantha red-handed. Smart and uncompromising, like the man himself.

Eureka Moment
House corners Samantha in the ladies bathroom and proves that her hands are covered in gold residue, via a lengthy, sarcastic story about a trip to Egypt.

Weird Science?
5/10

Between the gold case and House throwing facts about Herpes at a suspicious couple, the episode manages a few great science moments among a lot of relationship banter. It eventually wins the day with House’s makeshift gold test and the intricacies of heavy metal testing: a heavy metals test only looks for a small percentage of heavy metals as the others are impossible to get large doses of into your system unless… you’re being poisoned!

Bubonic Plague (Season 2, Episode 18)

Patient
Hannah hasn’t slept in 10 days, so she downs a bottle of sleeping pills – and still doesn’t sleep. Eventually, House forms a theory that Hannah is desperate to leave her girlfriend.

Symptoms
Chronic insomnia, rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, involuntary rapid eye movements, internal bleeding, liver failure.

House Moment
In order to keep her from sleeping, House refuses to sedate her during a colonoscopy. And you thought your boss was bad.

Eureka Moment
After realising that a dog Hannah bought had fleas originating from prairie dogs, House finds a growth on her arm and extracts black fluid from it, announcing that she has the plague.

Weird Science?
8/10

A few facts regarding sleeplessness – insanity after five days, death in 10, though someone has remained medically-assisted without sleep for 11 – open the episode. Upon discovering that Hannah does in fact sleep, but only for a few seconds every few minutes, House decides to force further symptoms by refusing to let her sleep at all.

Lupus (Season 4, Episode 8)

Patient
Flynn, a sarcastic, annoying magician, performs Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture trick and passes out. Kutner is convinced that he is ill, whereas House assumes he’s just a clumsy escape artist.

Symptoms
Cardiac arrest, numb extremities, multiple minor instances of internal bleeding, kidney failure.

House Moment
In order to prove it’s not a blood disease, House transfuses the potentially infected blood into himself. Following his lead, his team drug him to perform the biopsies that they are unable to perform on the patient.

Eureka Moment
After House recovers, he and Wilson bicker about their blood types (one of the more mature topics they argue about over the years) and House pauses for a trademark light bulb moment, but with more blood. Flynn’s blood has mistaken its own type and begun trying to cure itself, leading to a milestone moment in the viewing catalogue of every House, M.D. fan: House stating “…and finally, I’ve had a case of Lupus”.

Weird Science?
7/10

It was, at last, lupus! This version is particularly rare and although some of the blood-science isn’t fully accurate, it’s still pretty cool.

Intracranial Berry Aneurysm (Season 6, Episode 5)

Patient
Donny is a cop whose father and grandfather died at 40. Convinced his fate is set in stone, he begins taking wild risks before ending up in front of House with nothing but a feeling about his destiny.

Symptoms
None. (Later, he gets a phantom toothache.)

House Moment
Not entirely House’s fault, but after Donny is discharged and dies, House and Foreman begin to perform his autopsy. Until Donny wakes up. “What’s the differential diagnosis for resurrection?”

Eureka Moment
Cuddy makes a joke about buttons. House storms out of the room. He links this to a self-destruct button, an aneurysm growing near Donny’s spinal chord that is causing havoc and would have eventually severed the connection between brain and heart.

Weird Science?
8/10

Chickenpox (Season 7, Episode 9)

Patient
Jack saves a lady from a subway train before collapsing. With everyone telling him he’s a good person, he begins to believe them. House, unconvinced by his selfless act, attempts to solve the puzzle.

Symptoms
Fainting, fluid in the lungs, ear pain, liver inflammation, seizures, fever.

House Moment
House is forced to attend lunch with Cuddy, Wilson and Cuddy’s mother. In order to keep his promise to act like an adult, he drugs Wilson and Cuddy’s mother with sedatives.

Eureka Moment
House notices Jack’s daughter isn’t in school. This leads him to guess at an outbreak of chickenpox, which, if caught by an adult, can play havoc with their vital systems.

Weird Science?
7/10

Leptospirosis (Season 5, Episode 19)

Patient
Told from the locked-in point of view of the patient (Mos Def) who suffered brain damage and a bike crash, but which caused which?

Symptoms
Locked-in syndrome, seizures.

House Moment
In order to get some concrete answers out of the statuesque patient, House opts to biopsy his severely damaged brain stem.

Eureka Moment
When the team notice that the patient’s urine causes rashes, they link it to leptospirosis, a disease carried by rats. They search him and find a single paper cut where the infection entered.

Weird Science?
9/10

Propolene Glycol Toxicity (Season 5, Episode 24)

Patient
Scott begins to bleed from the eyes during a meal and immediately grabs House’s attention due to a previous brain operation resulting in Alien Hand Syndrome.

Symptoms
Lack of taste, bleeding from the eyes,

House Moment
The conclusion of Season 5, the episode builds to reveal the extent of House’s Vicodin addiction.

Eureka Moment
When Scott’s Alien hand acts out of the ordinary, Taub investigates the ingredients in his deodorant and deduces that Scott could’ve avoided his split-brain surgery altogether.

Weird Science?
8/10

Food in the Lung (Season 7, Episode 13)

Patient
Told in flashback form and packed with lies, little is known about the patient. He was admitted for chest pain and breathlessness.

Symptoms
Coughing up blood, coughing up pieces of lung tissue.

House Moment
Cuddy is annoyed at House and in order to fix this, House steals her laptop by releasing chemicals that result in several patients passing out and many more running for their lives. He succeeds in getting the laptop, though.

Eureka Moment
While talking to a local headmistress, House has a moment. He runs back to the hospital and explains that something small enough to be swallowed but too big to be regurgitated must be stuck in the man’s lung. Simple, weird and disgusting.

Weird Science?
6/10
 

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