Gregory House - Character History

Character History

Gregory House was born to John and Blythe House (R. Lee Ermey and Diane Baker) on 15 May 1959 House is a "military brat"; his father served as a Marine Corps aviator and transferred often to other bases during House's childhood. One place in which his father was stationed was Egypt, where House developed a fascination with archaeology and treasure-hunting, which led him to keep his treasure-hunting tools well into adulthood. Another station was Japan, where, at age 14, House discovered his vocation after a rock climbing incident with his friend. He witnessed the respect given to a buraku doctor who solved the case no other doctor could. He also spent some time in the Philippines, where he received dental surgery. House loves his mother but hates his father, who he claims has an "insane moral compass", and deliberately attempts to avoid both parents. At one point, House tells a story of his parents leaving him with his grandmother, whose punishments constituted abuse. However, he later confesses it was his father who abused him. Due to this abuse, House never believed John House was his biological father; at the age of 12, he inferred a friend of his family with the same birthmark was his real father. In the season 5 episode "Birthmarks", House discovers that this was true, after he ordered a DNA test that compared his DNA against John's. After performing a second DNA test in the season 8 episode "Love Is Blind", House discovers the man he thought was his biological father, Thomas Bell, wasn't, either. The identity of his real father is unknown.

House first attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate. Before fully committing to medicine as his discipline, he considered getting a Ph.D. in physics, researching dark matter. He was accepted to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and excelled during his time there. He was a front runner for a prestigious and competitive internship at the Mayo Clinic; however, during this time in medical school, he was caught cheating by another student, Philip Weber, and as a result, he was not accepted for the internship and was expelled from Johns Hopkins. During the time he was appealing his expulsion, he studied in the medical school at the University of Michigan, where, while working at a bookstore, he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), with whom he shared (in his words) a night where "he gave her everything she asked for." After the appeal process, he was denied re-entry into the JHMS. During a medical convention in New Orleans he attended shortly after graduating medical school, House first saw his eventual best friend Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time, broke a mirror in frustration and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox. House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear his name (who in fact failed to do so), starting their professional and personal relationship. House eventually became a Board certified diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology.

Approximately ten years before the beginning of the series, House entered into a relationship with Stacy Warner (Sela Ward), a constitutional lawyer, after she shot him during a "Lawyers vs. Doctors" paintball match. Five years later, during a game of golf, he suffered an infarction in his right leg which went misdiagnosed for three days due to doctors' concerns he was exhibiting drug-seeking behavior. House would eventually diagnose the infarction himself. An aneurysm in his thigh had clotted leading to an infarction and causing his quadriceps muscle to become necrotic. House had the dead muscle bypassed in order to restore circulation to the remainder of his leg, risking organ failure and cardiac arrest. He was willing to endure excruciating post-operative pain to retain the use of his leg.

However, after he was put into a chemically induced coma to sleep through the worst of the pain, Warner, House's medical proxy, acted against his wishes and authorized a safer surgical middle-ground procedure between amputation and a bypass by removing just the dead muscle. This resulted in the partial loss of use in his leg and left House with a lesser, but still serious, level of pain for the rest of his life. House could not forgive Stacy for making the decision and this was eventually the reason Stacy left him. House now suffers chronic pain in his thigh and uses a cane to aid his walking. He also frequently takes Vicodin to relieve his pain. House does however break his addiction with psychiatric help, after he suffers a psychotic break. When Warner makes her first appearance in season 1, she is married to a high school guidance counselor named Mark Warner. Although she and House have a brief, intimate encounter during the second season, House eventually tells Stacy to go back to her husband, devastating her.

At the beginning of season three, House temporarily regains his ability to walk and run after receiving ketamine treatment. However, the chronic pain in his leg comes back and House takes painkillers and uses his cane once again. The other doctors speculate his cane and opiate re-usage are due to his psychological tendencies.

On a routine clinic visit, a police detective, Michael Tritter, is seen by House. Tritter observes House taking Vicodin for his pain and blames this for House's being rude and a bully. Tritter, believing doctors should be more responsible while practicing medicine, decides to take it upon himself to take legal action to free House of his addiction by launching an investigation into suspected drug abuse. The investigation slowly involves Cuddy, Wilson and House's diagnostics team using extreme measures to get information. House, being forcibly weaned off of Vicodin to take a deal where he would keep his medical license, goes to extreme lengths to manage his pain by stealing Oxycodone from a cancer patient of Wilson's who had just died giving Tritter what he needed to bring House to trial. At the pretrial hearing, the Judge decides House is not a danger to society and that his pain management for his leg is not as serious as Tritter made it seem. This conclusion is reached when Cuddy manufactures evidence and perjures herself to keep House out of jail.

During season five, House once again regains his ability to walk without pain after taking methadone, but soon stops after nearly killing a patient due to an uncharacteristic medical error. At the end of season five, House's use of Vicodin reaches a level in which House starts hallucinating about a former fellowship candidate and a relationship with Cuddy. When House comes to the conclusion Vicodin is making him hallucinate and taking over his life, he checks himself into Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. At the start of season six, after spending time in Mayfield, House stops taking pain medications and with the help of Dr. Darryl Nolan, finds other ways to deal with his pain and other aspects of his life. Thirteen and Wilson discover House is a great cook, attributing this to House thinking of ingredients in terms of chemistry.

House eventually finds the one thing that seems to help the pain go away: practicing medicine. After he diagnoses a patient online for his team (without their knowledge), and shows Doctor Nolan how this reduces his pain, Nolan suggests House resume his practise.

In season seven, when Cuddy, who is House's girlfriend at this point, has a brush with death, House goes back on Vicodin in order to cope with the fear of losing her. Near the end of season seven, House finds out the experimental drug he had been using caused fatal cancerous tumors in all of the lab rats in the experiment. He gets a CT scan of his leg and finds three tumors close to the surface of the skin in his leg. He goes home, cleans his bathroom, and attempts to perform surgery on himself to extract the tumors in his bathtub.

In season eight, House finds himself in jail after running his car into Cuddy's house. There he finds his need for Vicodin is a weakness when an inmate makes House steal 20 pills of Vicodin or be killed. Throughout season eight, House's abuse of Vicodin becomes more habitual like it was before season five.

The final season's opening episode partly explores what path an imprisoned House would take aside from practicing medicine, revealing physics as his other forté. The episode "Body & Soul" makes a nod to this with a reference to a particle physics text amongst his books, as mentioned by his then-wife Dominika Petrova (Karolina Wydra). House fakes his own death in the series finale, thus giving up his ability to practice medicine again, in order to spend time with Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), who has five months left to live. He does this in order to avoid being sent back to prison for destroying an MRI machine in a prank gone wrong. The series ends with House and Wilson riding off into the countryside on motorcycles, as Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) takes over House's department.