What is the name of House’s fictional medical specialty at Princeton-Plainsboro?

House’s fictional medical specialty at Princeton-Plainsboro is diagnostic medicine. He leads the hospital’s Department of Diagnostic Medicine, which investigates cases that remain unresolved after routine specialist consultations.

The department functions as the show’s storytelling engine. House assigns unusual cases to a small team, asks for competing explanations, orders tests, and repeatedly revises the working diagnosis as new evidence appears. The process resembles a medical version of a detective investigation.

In real hospitals, diagnosis is performed across many specialties rather than usually being isolated in a department led by one physician like House. Physicians in internal medicine, emergency medicine, pathology, radiology, neurology, and other fields all contribute to diagnosis. The series therefore dramatizes and concentrates a real clinical function.

Diagnostic medicine is sometimes mistaken for internal medicine because House is trained as an internist and is board-certified in infectious disease and nephrology within the show’s backstory. His department, however, is explicitly called Diagnostic Medicine, and that is the canonical name used in the series.