Gregory House was born to John and Blythe House on June 11, 1959,[9] or May 15, 1959.[10] House is a military brat; his father served as a Marine Corps aviator and transferred often to other bases during House's childhood.[11] House presumably picked up his affinity with languages during this period and shows a level of understanding of Chinese,[12] Greek,[13] Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, and Yiddish. One place in which his father was stationed was Egypt, where House developed a fascination with archaeology and treasure-hunting, which led him to keep his treasure-hunting tools well into adulthood.[14] Another station was Japan, where a 14-year-old House discovered his vocation after a rock-climbing incident with his friend. He witnessed the respect given to a buraku doctor who solved the case no other doctor could.[15] He also spent some time in the Philippines, where he had dental surgery.

House first attended Johns Hopkins University for his undergraduate years as a physics major. Before fully committing to medicine as his discipline, he considered getting a Ph.D. in physics, researching dark matter.[19] He was accepted to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and excelled during his time there. He was a frontrunner for a prestigious and competitive internship at the Mayo Clinic, but another student, Philip Weber, reported House for plagiarizing him, resulting in House's expulsion from Johns Hopkins and rejection from the internship.[20] While appealing his expulsion, he studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and worked at a bookstore, where he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy,[21] with whom he shared a night where "he gave her everything she asked for".[22] Years later, Cuddy noted that House, although still a student, had already become "a legend" due to his diagnostic brilliance. After the appeal process, he was denied re-entry into Johns Hopkins. During a medical convention in New Orleans, House first saw his eventual best friend Dr. James Wilson. Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time, broke a mirror in frustration, and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox. Out of sheer boredom with the convention and to "have somebody to drink with", House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear Wilson's name (which he failed to do), starting their professional and personal relationship.[17] House identifies himself multiple times during the series as a "board-certified diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology."[23]

Approximately ten years before the beginning of the series, House entered into a relationship with Stacy Warner, a constitutional lawyer, after she shot him during a "Lawyers vs. Doctors" paintball match.[15] Five years later, during a game of golf, he suffered an infarction in his right leg which went misdiagnosed for three days. House eventually diagnosed the infarction himself. An aneurysm in his thigh had clotted, leading to an infarction and causing his quadriceps muscle to become necrotic. House had the dead muscle bypassed to restore circulation to the remainder of his leg, risking organ failure and cardiac arrest. He was unwilling to allow an amputation, opting instead to endure excruciating post-operative pain to retain the use of his leg. However, after he was put into a chemically induced coma to sleep through the worst of the pain, Stacy, House's medical proxy, and Cuddy, who was House's doctor at the time, acted against his wishes and authorized a safer surgical middle-ground procedure between amputation and a bypass by removing just the dead muscle. This resulted in the partial loss of use in his leg and left House with a lesser, but still serious, level of pain for the rest of his life.[24]

Accessed 11/1/2026