Stephen McWilliams
Dublin, Ireland

In David Shore’s award-winning television series House, M.D. (2004–2012), Hugh Laurie played the eponymous Dr. Gregory House. Aficionados have always thrived on tales and legends reimagined, and perhaps House, M.D. is no different. Its narrative may have evoked in its millions of viewers a subconscious whisper of another famous and beloved character: Sherlock Holmes.

House is the head of diagnostic medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, likely based on the real-life Yale New Haven Hospital. He leads a team of clever if somewhat psychologically damaged disciples who do his bidding, even if this means breaking the law or putting their own health at risk. House offers them little thanks for their loyalty; indeed, he typically treats them with distain until they each finally conclude that he is more of a liability than an asset to their careers and move elsewhere. Occasionally they return in a position of similar or sometimes greater status, but they can never manage to equal House’s intellect.

House’s methods are unorthodox. He leaves the polite bedside manner to his resident junior doctors while he mulls over diagnoses in his office or holds case conferences around a whiteboard. Although he reluctantly conducts public outpatient clinics at the insistence of his boss, he rarely seems to have more than one inpatient at any given time. But this one diagnostic conundrum commands one hundred percent of his attention. House is rational to a fault, often at the expense of any compassion for the patient. He pays little heed to the patient’s own account of their history and repeatedly insists, “Everybody lies.” Instead, he has his junior doctors break into patients’ homes to search for potential causes of illness. At various times, he is quite willing to expose himself or his staff to medical misadventure by way of infectious diseases, noxious chemicals, experimental medicines, or even surgery. House is brilliant but reckless.

The similarities between Gregory House and Sherlock Holmes are striking. First, both solve cases empirically, using extraordinary powers of deduction to generate hypotheses, then put them to the test. Both characters base their conclusions on psychological and physical evidence that often goes unnoticed by others. Their intellects are matched by their dry wit, hubris, proneness to boredom, defiance of convention, and limited social skills. In the pilot episode of House, M.D., for example, House is consulted by a man whose skin has mysteriously turned orange.¹

The disgruntled doctor immediately identifies the cause, while also correctly observing rather bluntly that the man’s wife must be having an affair. Later, he extricates himself from clinic duty by standing in the waiting area for a minute and rapidly diagnosing each patient based purely on their appearances. He then shuffles impatiently out the door and is gone. House takes on cases he finds intriguing and avoids all others like the plague. This level of discernment also characterizes Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet (1887). Dr. Watson narrates the story, having recently returned from the second Afghan war with a shoulder wound. Running low on funds and having “neither kith nor kin in England,” he seeks someone with whom to rent lodgings in London while he convalesces.² Holmes instantly deduces Watson’s circumstances, then demonstrates his empirical skills by solving a case that has otherwise confounded the local constabulary. Watson is not impressed at first. “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin,” he says to Holmes. “I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”³ Holmes retorts, “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

Regardless of Holmes’ views on Dupin, he himself was anything but overrated. Indeed, he was far more successful than even Doyle could have predicted. A Study in Scarlet was followed by The Sign of Four (1890) and some fifty-six short stories in the Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1927, all subsequently republished in five volumes of short stories. But eventually, Doyle began to tire of his literary creation. In 1896, he complained in a letter to fellow novelist David Christie Murray that “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de fois gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.”⁴ In The Final Problem(1893) we witness Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, battling his arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty (“the Napoleon of crime”) before the two men plummet to their supposed deaths. This was a source of great disappointment to Doyle’s large, loyal readership, who showed limited interest in his subsequent literary endeavors. Bowing to relentless public pressure, Doyle resurrected his hero some ten years later in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902).

Doyle is said to have distilled Holmes from three principal characters: Poe’s Detective Dupin; Eugène François Vidocq (a real-life former criminal who became the first chief of the Surété in Paris on the principle that it takes a thief to catch one); and Professor Joseph Bell (Doyle’s old surgical lecturer at the University of Edinburgh). Similarly, Shore is thought to have based House on a prominent professor at the University of Washington-Seattle, but House is also undoubtedly based on Sherlock Holmes himself. Semantically, their names mean the same thing. House and Holmes also share the same fictional address of 221B Baker Street, albeit in different cities. House’s best friend is Dr. James Wilson, and the dynamics between the two characters are strikingly similar to those of Holmes and Watson.

Both House and Holmes have encountered serious addiction problems; the former uses Vicodin (an opioid analgesic), and the latter uses cocaine and morphine. Both men play instruments purely for personal pleasure; Holmes plays the violin, while House plays the piano, guitar, and other instruments. In the Season Two finale, a man named Jack Moriarty shoots House.⁵ Holmes’ nemesis, the man with whom he shared a presumed demise at Reichenbach Falls, is Professor James Moriarty. Finally, in Season Five, when House receives an antique medical book from an unknown admirer, Wilson covers for him by inventing an old flame by the name of Irene Adler. He tells colleagues that House once fell in love with her and that she was “the one who got away.”⁶ Irene Adler is, of course, the name of Holmes’ female rival in A Scandal in Bohemia. She is indeed the only antagonist ever to outwit him.

So, in the end, House and Holmes have so much in common that it cannot be mere coincidence. Anyone can deduce that.

References

1. House, M.D. Season 1, episode 1, “Everybody Lies.” Fox. First aired November 16, 2004.
2. A Study in Scarlet. In The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Penguin: 15.
3. Doyle, A Study in Scarlet: 24.
4. David Stuart Davies. “Shackled to Sherlock: Conan Doyle’s troubled relationship with his greatest creation.” Royal Literary Fund, November 28, 2015. https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/shackled-to-sherlock/. Accessed \October 17, 2026.
5. House, M.D. Season 2, episode 24, “No Reason.” Fox. First aired May 23, 2006.
6. House, M.D. Season 5, episode 11, “Joy to the World.” Fox. First aired December 9, 2009.