What is Dr. House’s medical specialty at Princeton-Plainsboro in House, M.D.?

Dr. Gregory House’s medical specialty at Princeton-Plainsboro in House, M.D. is diagnostic medicine. He leads the hospital’s fictional Department of Diagnostic Medicine, where his team handles unusually difficult cases.

Diagnostic medicine in the series is presented as a collaborative process involving patient history, examinations, laboratory work, imaging, and differential diagnosis. House directs the investigation and often proposes unconventional explanations when more common diagnoses fail.

House also has formal expertise in nephrology and infectious disease. Those specialties explain why he can contribute detailed knowledge in particular cases, but they do not replace his role as the hospital’s leading diagnostician. This distinction is the source of a common mix-up: nephrology and infectious disease are his subspecialties, while diagnostic medicine is his department and principal role.

The program dramatizes diagnosis in a heightened way for television. Real hospitals may organize complex diagnostic work across multiple departments rather than around one physician-led unit like House’s.