Samuel Shem

Samuel Shem is the pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman, novelist, playwright, and activist. Among his many published works are the international bestseller, The House of God (featured on Publishers Weekly's list of "The 10 Best Satires of All Time”), Man's 4th Best Hospital, and The Spirit of the Place, winner of two American national book awards. Educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stephen Bergman is Professor of Medicine in Medical Humanities at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has been Visiting Scholar at The American Academy of Rome.

For more information about Samuel Shem:

Website | Twitter

Our Hospital

After the tragic climax of Man's 4th Best Hospital, four doctors have left practicing medicine. But with COVID-19 sweeping the country, they come together to help the small town of Columbia, New York. The doctors and nurses are buckling as they battle both a raging pandemic and the financial woes facing small hospitals everywhere. But no matter what's happening in the world, babies are born, people fall in love, and doctors will do anything to save their patients.

Our Hospital reveals the daily struggle of fighting a pandemic and its personal impact on healthcare workers young and old, who are terrified, exhausted...and determined, somehow, to prevail.

(Berkley, July 2023)

The House of God

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative novel about what it really takes to become a doctor.

The raunchy, troubling, and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon. Singularly compelling…brutally honest.”—The New York Times

Struggling with grueling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident known only as the Fat Man, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. A phenomenon ever since it was published, The House of God was the first unvarnished, unglorified, and uncensored portrait of what training to become a doctor is truly like, in all its terror, exhaustion and black comedy. With more than two million copies sold worldwide, it has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels ever written.

(Berkley, September 2010)

Man's 4th Best Hospital

The sequel to the bestselling and highly acclaimed The House of God.

Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again.

What follows is a mesmerizing, heartbreaking, and hilarious exploration of how the health-care industry, and especially doctors, have evolved over the past thirty years.

(Berkley, November 2019)

Mount Misery

There are no laws in psychiatry.

A lacerating and brilliant novel about doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance.

On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors, and the practice of psychiatry soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things, including their own professional advancement.

What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.

(Ballantine, July 2003)

The Spirit of the Place

Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.

(Berkley, December 2012)