COMPARE and CONTRAST

Rather than doing anything really important or productive over the Labor Day weekend, I indulged excessively in video entertainment. I had the complete Season 5 of House, M.D, to finish (can you watch just one episode at a time? I like to watch ALL the DVD episodes, the whole season, pretty much back-to-back, once a year, commercial free) and a number of wuxia/kung fu movies, featuring Vincent Zhao Wen Zhou and Tiny Tony Leung.

How they compare and contrast:

1. They all feature a lot of blood spurting out of mouths, frequently, but as a result in House you're more likely to end up with a lumbar puncture, not quite so severe as impalement on a sword.
2. In wuxia, medicine is usually some gooey paste, a foul tasting herbal concoction, or swift jerking of limbs back in place. No MRIs and diagnoses of Cushing's, Wegner's, amyloidosis or lupus.
3. I actually worked for a guy once who looked exactly like House, but he was not so...hyper-rational (or as Season 6 hints, mentally ill; I will try to remember to tune in to the 2-hour Season Premiere of the only TV program I watch anymore, but not usually on TV); and I still work with some guys who look not unlike Tony and Vincent. Still, none of them are diagnosticians or kung fu masters...that I know of.

But now I have a new idea to integrate wu xia and Western medicine. (If CCTV hasn't already thought of it. ) A TV Series, Kung Fu Doc. (Or at least an interesting House storyline.) In Wudang, I had a hard time taking seriously the TCM prescriptions of this guy who looked exactly like Jackie Chan. He can star in the series! Here is his hospital. Enter at your own risk.

And it came to me as I awoke this morning (9/10, after reviewing House's hallucinatory end-of-season episode last night) that there is a fourth compare and contrast. Both genres explore the distinctions and connections between body and spirit, the material and the non-material, to say nothing of plots involving opioids. I would love to see House be cured of his pain and doubt by a Taoist master (preferably played by Vincent Zhao) projecting qi (energy). Or maybe Wilson could take up qigong; he seems most open to these things.