Gregory House was a doctor who started off abled and ended up with multiple disabilities, many of which were often dismissed by his friends, such as his chronic pain.
Gregory House had a serious drug addiction which was never romanticized and was treated very seriously and carefully by the writers, adding to this complicated character without ever making it seem like his addiction was a good thing and while it plainly showed his reasons for said addiction, they never used those reasons as an excuse.
Gregory House was shown to be depressed multiple times throughout the show and openly admitted that he contemplated suicide before.
Gregory House was an atheist who knew that praying to a higher power wasn’t going to make him wake up one day completely cured and while the show probably went a bit extreme with its religion bashing, it was actually a refreshing breather from characters like Locke who constantly preached that if you have faith, you will be completely healed.
Gregory House once delivered one of my favorite quotes ever: “Skinny, socially privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle. Everyone inside the circle is normal. Everyone outside the circle should be beaten, broken and reset so they can be brought into the circle. Failing that, they should be institutionalized or worse, pitied.”
In that same episode, Gregory House was the only character who was able to connect to an autistic patient because nobody else could be bothered to do so and he was the only one who was in that ‘circle’ with the kid. He knew it and he knew exactly how to communicate with the child until he was the one who figured out the medical issue.
Gregory House was a complete and utter asshole to everyone in his life and not once was this romanticized or villanized, it simply was a part of his character.
Gregory House was one of the best characters that showed that negative character development was still character development.
Gregory House gave some genuinely philosophical speeches and managed to prevent each and every single one of those speeches from being inspiration porn.
Gregory House was a genius who truly loved being a doctor and often struggled to balance his work and his disabilities.
Gregory House was a man who had a hatred, even a fear, of being wrong because being wrong meant that he wasn’t able to figure out the problem, that he couldn’t figure out the problem and as a character with multiple disabilities, he didn’t ever want to be seen as the man who couldn’t do something.
Gregory House was not able to be cured of his disabilities and demons. Not by a higher power. Not by medicine. Not by a love interest.
Gregory House was a disabled character who had layers upon layers of development, positive and negative, whose disabilities did define him, who was okay with having his disabilities define him, who was so much more than his disabilities, but disabled nonetheless.
House MD is an extremely flawed show with major problems including sexism and homophobia/transphobia but at the end of the day, it gave the disabled community one of the best examples of disability representation out there, second only to Bryke’s characters. It gave us a character whose disabilities were not used as inspiration porn but also didn’t dip too far into tragedy porn. It gave us a character who was not cured in the end and didn’t die in the end and was still living with his disabilities, getting through life one day at a time. It gave us a character who never sugar-coated things, who never tried to shy away from the topic of disabilities, who wasn’t afraid to make abled people uncomfortable.
Growing up disabled (we should make that a hashtag) House MD was one of my favorite shows and it had a huge impact on me. It still does.
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