Disability Gregory House

Name	Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie)
Profession	Chief of Diagnostic Medicine
Disability(/ies)	Leg infarction (an area of tissue death on his leg)
Other Problems	Addicted to Vicodin, a painkiller
Personality	He’s portrayed as a misanthrope (someone who doesn’t like people), cynic, narcissist (essentially elitism, and being selfish), and a curmudgeon (an ill-tempered person whose very stubborn).

House’s disability is a leg infarction, which causes him a lot of pain (hence the use of Vicodin to counter it) and makes him walk with a cane so that he can balance right.

His disability seems to conform to 5 of the 10 stereotypes of disabled people in media – he’s seen as an object of curiosity (in that his boss is constantly trying to find ways to fix it, to the point where at the end of one of the series she forces a surgery on him without his consent to do so), sinister/evil (he’s sometimes driven to violent means in order to get the outcome he wants, such as during a hallucination where he cuts open and kills a patient in order to break himself out of it), laughable (he often makes jokes of it, such as when he annoys a patient to the point of violence and then says “You wouldn’t hit a cripple”), his own worst enemy and a burden (the pain in his leg is implied after the surgery to be imaginary, stemming from his drug addiction which came from the pain to begin with, and he’s looked down upon because of it – he even almost gets sent to jail for it).

Though in some ways the portrayal disability could be seen as very hyperbolic, the show does deal with it in several accurate ways that can come from disability – mainly House’s addiction to painkillers, which a lot of people going through pain can have happen to them (for example, the actor Matthew Perry was in a car crash and subsequently became addicted to the painkillers he got from them).

Shakespeare’s view that when disabilities are used as plot devices distance the audience from the characters and they become only seen through said impairment seems to have been flipped around with this character – the characters that House comes across view him through his impairment, but the audience can relate to him as a character, despite his many differences. Despite the fact that he’s a medical genius, and is always correct when diagnosing patients (other than one time, but he sorts that out at some point during season two, I believe), the other characters doubt his intelligence and often mistake it for arrogance or a stubbornness for Vicodin.

A prime example of this would be when his boss, Lisa Cuddy, refuses to believe House when he tells her that a catatonic patient can be revived by simply injecting him with a certain chemical. She then gives in to temptation later on and tries it, and it works perfectly, yet she refuses to let House know for fears of it increasing his arrogance, instead letting him feel that he should be more careful when diagnosing patients, if only for lawsuits’ sake.

Overall, I’d say that the way House’s disability is both realistic and fair – despite being intelligently greater than most of the other characters, and being of a higher rank, he is often looked down on because of his disability and his drug addiction. He’s also often pitied, despite his complete disregard for the way his patients actually feel, and even gets shot at one point by someone that he’s a douche to.