Novelist Doctor Skewers Corporate Medicine In 'Man's 4th Best Hospital'

"Don't read The House of God," one of my professors told me in my first year of medical school.

He was talking about Samuel Shem's 1978 novel about medical residency, an infamous book whose legacy still looms large in academic medicine. Shem — the pen name of psychiatrist Stephen Bergman — wrote it about his training at Harvard's Beth Israel Hospital (which ultimately became Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in Boston.

My professor told me not to read it, I imagine, because it's a deeply cynical book and perhaps he hoped to preserve my idealism. Even though it has been more than 40 years since its publication, doctors today still debate whether it deserves its place in the canon of medical literature.

The novel follows Dr. Roy Basch, a fictional version of Shem, and his fellow residents during the first year of their medical training. They learn to deflect responsibility for challenging patients, put lies in their patients' medical records and conduct romantic affairs with the nursing staff.

Basch's friends even coin a term that iswith a long list of chronic conditionsare still sometimes called "gomers," which stands for "Get Out of My Emergency Room."