The House of God (Black Swan)

As in all hospitals, the medical hierarchy of The House of God was a pyramid - a lot at the bottom and one at the top. Put another way, it was like an ice-cream cone...you had to lick your way up! Roy Basch, the 'red-hot' Rhodes Scholar, thought differently - but then he hadn't met Hyper Hooper, out to win the most post-mortems of the year award, nor Molly, the nurse with the crash helmet. He hadn't even met any of the Gomers ('Get Out of My Emergency Room!'), the no-hopers who wanted to die but who were worth more alive... The House of God is a wild and raunchily irreverent novel that teaches you the not-so-gentle arts of healing, and tells you what your doctor never wanted you to know. It is the best medicine since M*A*S*H, and does for the doctor's art what Catch-22 did for the art of war. "Struggling with gruelling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, intern Roy Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident known only as the Fat Man, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. A phenomenon ever since it was published, The House of God was the first unvarnished, unglorified, and uncensored portrait of what training to become a doctor is truly like, in all its terror, exhaustion and black comedy. With more than two million copies sold worldwide, it has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels ever written." - from the publisher The book starts at the end of the book with the main character having finished his internship at the House of God. He's lying with his girlfriend, Berry, reflecting back on his year of internship. The two are vacationing in the South of France. They are enjoying a lunch of artichokes in a garden, reflecting back on the year and on the "gomers" the elderly, demented patients he had to take care of in the House of God. Everything is reminding him of the gomers. He even sees them at a hospice and feels anxious about it We expect the world of doctors.