If you’ve watched ‘House‘, you already know Gregory House isn’t the ideal TV doctor. He’s brilliant, sarcastic, notices everything, and solves cases almost like a detective.
A lot of fans point out how much he reminds them of Sherlock Holmes, and that’s not a coincidence. The writers definitely used Sherlock as a starting point, but House’s real inspiration goes even beyond Sherlock.
Sherlock’s Connection To ‘House’ Explained
When David Shore first created the show, he didn’t immediately know what ‘House‘ should be like. He later said he kept asking himself things like, “Who exactly is this guy?” and “What makes him different from other TV doctors?” Some of Shore’s own cynical personality slipped into the character, but Sherlock Holmes ended up shaping a huge part of who House became.
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And the Sherlock connection isn’t even random. Sherlock Holmes was actually based on a real doctor named Joseph Bell. Arthur Conan Doyle studied under Bell at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881, and later worked alongside him at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
Bell was known for diagnosing people almost instantly, just by observing them. Doyle talked about this often, because Bell could figure out someone’s symptoms and even details about their life before they even opened their mouth. David Shore admitted that Sherlock Holmes was a “big part” of ‘House‘.
The Real Inspiration Behind Dr. Gregory House
Research says Bell could look at someone’s hands and guess their job, or check their shoes and figure out where they’d been that day. People who watched him work said his attention to tiny details was unbelievable. Bell once told a reporter that good doctors should learn to “notice the little apparent trifles.”
‘House‘ follows that idea almost exactly; he just uses modern “trifles,” like spotting lies or noticing something small in a patient’s story. It’s basically Bell’s method, adapted for a TV drama. The show even sneaks in a direct reference to Bell. In Season 5’s “Joy to the World,” Wilson gives House an old surgical book written by Bell in 1869.
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Then, in the Season 2 finale “No Reason,” House gets shot by a man named Jack Moriarty, the same surname as Holmes’ biggest enemy. Besides, House also struggles with a Vicodin addiction, which mirrors Holmes’ cocaine use in the original stories. And surprisingly, House’s home address is 221B; it’s from Sherlock’s Baker Street.
The Joseph Bell references are also there. In a 2006 interview with Radio Times, David Shore said Bell could walk into a waiting room and diagnose people without talking to them. That sounds exactly like something House would do in the first five minutes of an episode. So yes, Sherlock Holmes is a huge part of the character development of ‘House’, but the real-life doctor contributed no less.
