In the 22-episode first season of the hit medical drama “House,” the autoimmune disease lupus is mentioned 29 times, according to a fan tally on Reddit. Lupus is then brought up 20 times in Season 2, eight times in Season 3, and 16 times in Season 4. And one fan noted that if you include nonverbal references to lupus, like when Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) “smacks the whiteboard with his cane where the word lupus is,” the number grows even higher.
Though Hugh Laurie recently ripped into a “House” viewer who complained that every episode was the same, it can’t be denied that the mentions of lupus are repetitive.
In a 2024 interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner David Shore explained why lupus was so popular with the “House” writing staff: “We were looking for diseases that could be serious but could manifest in a lot of different ways. And unfortunately for many — for us, it was fortunate — lupus was the perfect disease for us! It was a disease that manifested in a lot of ways, and so it could be the wrong diagnosis many times. And so we just kind of embraced that and ran with that.”
Only one patient on House ever has lupus
It didn’t take long for David Shore to notice how frequently the show was mentioning the autoimmune disease. He recalled writing the note, “We’re running out of diseases already,” in the margins of an early episode script “because apparently it was the second or third or fourth time we’d mentioned lupus.”
Pretty soon, lupus became a running joke in the series and in the fandom. House grows so dismissive of the disease that by Season 6, he’s carved up a lupus textbook and turned it into a stash for his Vicodin because he’s so confident that he will not need the textbook for any other purpose. “I think [the writers] just went and had fun with it,” said Omar Epps, who played Dr. Eric Foreman, in a 2012 interview with Stuff.
In Season 4, the show subverts the joke by introducing a patient who actually does have lupus. When asked if he’d always known they were going to do a true lupus storyline, Shore told EW, “I can’t recall the details. I suspect yes, we had an internal discussion about that, ‘Yeah, I guess we have to do it once.’ We set up, ‘It’s never lupus, it’s never lupus,’ now we have to make it lupus.”
