Blog 1 Gregory House - Champion of Rhetoric

If you aren’t familiar with the show House MD, for shame! It is one of the most clever shows on television at the moment, certainly with the most clever character on television – Doctor Gregory House. “House”, as he’s more commonly called around the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, would have been fired multiple times over in the real world for his dreadful bedside manner, careless drug addiction, and most unscrupulous nature. So how do the writers of the show explain the fact House is still employed? His ability to rhetorically analyze people and situations, and to use what he learns to manipulate them. Unfortunately he often lacks the ability to rhetorically analyze his own dialogues and rarely censors himself, which causes a lot of trouble in his personal relationship. House’s best weapon is pure sarcasm, and he is often known to use metaphors in the differential diagnosis process so that his team is forced to rhetorically analyze what their boss has said in order to help the patient of the week.