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This article is about the episode. For the procedure see Autopsy (procedure)

House: "Is it still illegal to perform an autopsy on a living person?"

Cuddy: "Are you high?"

―Autopsy

Autopsy is a 2nd season episode of House which first aired on September 20, 2005. A nine year old with terminal cancer who is hallucinating comes to the hospital. House thinks her bravery in the face of imminent death is actually a symptom of her condition. Meanwhile, House tries to get over a cold and test drives a motorcycle.

Screenwriter Lawrence Kaplow won the Writers Guild of America award for his screenplay for this episode.

Recap

A 9 year old terminal cancer patient has a seizure and hallucinations while getting ready for the day.

House comes in with a bad cold and is ready to leave, but Wilson intercepts him about the patient. House in intrigued about the hallucinations when he finds out there is no cancer in her brain and the cancer is in remission. House agrees to take the case.

The team is reviewing the patient's medical history, which contains a long line of treatment. They can't come up with a reason for the hallucinations. House orders a tox screen and an MRI. He tells Cameron not to get attached to the patient.

Chase takes the patient to the MRI. The patient is very familiar with all the technology. However, the MRI and tox screen are clear. House excuses himself to go home and orders them to run a lot of tests.

Chase gets ready to perform an angiogram. The patient asks him to kiss her because she hasn't been kissed. Chase does so.

House comes in the next morning, not having slept. All the new tests are negative. Foreman suggests it might be syphilis from involuntary sex. Chase tells them that she hasn't even been kissed and that she asked him to kiss her. House thinks that she is being manipulative and that she did get Chase to kiss her. However, the patient denies ever having had sex and Cameron's examination confirms it.

House interrupts Wilson to tell him that they have no idea what is wrong with the patient. House is still convinced there is something wrong, and he thinks it might be a heart tumor because of the low oxygen saturation. However, that would mean she has two different cancers - a statistical unlikelihood. Wilson is sceptical and won't let House do exploratory surgery.

House meets his team in the locker room so they can listen to the patient's heart to see if there are signs of a tumor. Cameron hears an extra flap in her mitral valve. House orders surgery to look at it.

Wilson and House discuss the patient's bravery. Wilson is impressed, but House isn't.

They find a tumor in her lung and heart, growing along the heart wall. They start to repair it. However, they may have to remove too much of the heart to repair it, and the tumor may have metastasized. During the surgery, the patient's eye starts bleeding.

However, he heart tumor is benign, and the eye bleeding obviously isn't related to it, and neither are the hallucinations. House thinks it might be a blood clot in her brain, thrown off by the heart tumor. They start looking for it. However, the angiogram is clean - there is a clot but they can't find it.

They can't do exploratory surgery on the brain, and they know the clot could cause death at any time.

House wonders how the patient will be when Wilson tells her she's going to die. An enraged Wilson tells House to go to Hell before storming off.

Wilson goes to tell the patient she will die. Her mother is more upset than she is. House wonders if the patient's bravery shows some form of brain damage which may be affecting her ability to feel fear. Foreman feels the only way they can find the clot is at the autopsy. However, this gives House an idea.

House asks Cuddy if he can induce a hypothermic cardiac arrest, drain half the patient's blood and re-infuse the blood to look for the clot with a portable MRI. Despite the risks, Cuddy agrees. Wilson goes to get consent from the mother. House learns that Wilson hasn't told the patient the risks, and surmises that perhaps the patient's bravery is from not knowing what is going on. House goes to talk to her about the risks of the procedure and how long she has to live even if they are successful. The patient doesn't want to die despite the fact that the treatment for her cancer will be painful because her mother needs her and she loves her.

A large surgical team tests the procedure on a corpse several times. They need to complete the procedure within one minute without bumping the body to get useful results. They finally find a solution to keep the blood lines from being moved - bolting them to the table. They start the procedure on the patient with a full house watching from the observation room. They cool her body temperature down to 21C (70F), sending her into atrial fibrillation. They then drain her blood and re-infuse it. Just after the end of the sixty seconds, Foreman spots a slowdown in blood flow in the hippocampus. With no time remaining, they start warming her up again. They restart her heart and start surgery. They find the clot where Foreman saw it. The patient recovers, and is still brave. Wilson points out that the bravery obviously wasn't a symptom as the clot wasn't in her amygdyla. House admits he was wrong, but still isn't impressed. Wilson points out that the patient enjoys life more than House does, and could actually outlive him. The patient leaves the hospital after giving House a hug and then invites him for a walk.

House goes to test drive a motorcycle.

Awards

This is one of the most honored episodes of the series:

Lawrence Kaplow won the Writers Guild of America award for Episodic Drama for this episode
The episode won a Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing in Television Short Form - Dialogue and Automated Dialogue Replacement
The episode was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera series

Clinic Patient

The patient requests a male doctor. House comes in and sees blood in the patient’s groin. He tried to circumcize himself with some box cutters when his girlfriend reacted poorly to his uncircumcised penis. House sends him to a plastic surgeon.

Major Events

House starts riding motorcycles for the first time since his infarction.

Zebra Factor 1/10

Clots are a common complication of many forms of cancer.

Reviews

IMDB users rated the episode an outstanding 9.2, with 54.6% of users rating it a 10.
TV.com users rated the episode a 9.0. Sasha Pieterse was voted the episode's most valuable performer.
Unified Theory of Nothing Much gave the episode a positive review, but described it largely as a roller coaster ride that had him crying just after laughing. He found it a more gripping episode than Acceptance depsite a more subdued tone.
Conversely, Polite Dissent gave the episode a negative review with bad medicine and no soap opera plot, as well as creating several false dilemmas for the characters. He also thought he writers tried to hard to appeal to the emotions of the audience. He rated the mystery a C, the medicine a D- and the overall plot a C-.

Trivia & Cultural References

Afghanistan is a country in central Asia with a population just less than that of California.
Al-Qaeda or “The Base“ is a militant terrorist group.
Buffalo is the second largest city in New York State and sits on the border with Canada.
Chase's age is given as 30, but in an earlier episode, it was given as 26. Jesse Spencer was 26 at the time the episode was released.
We don't see House take vicodin in this episode, but he does admit taking some after Andie's mom approves the procedure, along with other medications for his hay fever.
House uses an English variation of the hospital's motto "Omnes te moriturum amant" when talking about Andie (If you're dying, suddenly everybody loves you).
House uses a lot of Yiddish. "Rivkah" is the modern Hebrew for "Rebecca". "Gemutlich" is "comfortable" or "friendly" - a borrow from German. "Shanda" is used to express shame, particularly when Jews are embarrased before non-Jews. Roughly, he's saying that the clinic patient is ashamed he's not circumcised and wanted to go through with it to make his girlfriend happy.
House is right that prostitutes do not kiss their clients on the mouth. It's not an intimacy problem - they just want to avoid catching a cold, influenza, mononucleosis or other diseases that are transmitted in that manner.
This is the first episode where it appears that House and Wilson's offices are joined by a balcony. This connecting balcony doesn't appear in the previous episodes, but the characters act like it has always been there.
House test drives a Aprilia 1000cc RSV Mille. However, this isn't House's Motorcycle, which is a Honda CBR1000RR
Broadway is the only street that runs the length of the island of Manhattan. It is synonymous with live theatre.
"A five-six-seven-eight" is taken from A Chorus Line, which is also referenced in The Down Low
Cats is another Broadway musical.
Des Moines is the capital and largest city in the state of Iowa.

Nessun dorma

The aria House plays in the shower in order to try out the acoustics before listening to Andie's heart beat is Nessun dorma from Turandot by Puccini. The plot of the episode mirrors that of Turdandot in several respects (see the link at the House M.D. Guide, below).

Like the Prince in the opera, House must answer three questions to get to the princess (in his case, why does she have low oxygen levels, where does the clot come from, and why is she so brave). In all three cases, the answer is "the heart".
Turandot herself is seen as cold, and to find the final answer, Andie's body temperature has to be artificially lowered.
Turandot has numerous suitors, and Andie is universally loved as well.
House complains he can't sleep because of his hay fever, and "nessun dorma" translates as "none shall sleep".
Turandot features beheadings of the unsuccessful suitors, and the clinic patient tries to remove the head of his penis to please his girlfriend.
The Prince brags that his kiss will make Turandot his, and Andie steals a kiss from Chase.
The Prince brags that a secret is hidden with him, and Andie has a clot hidden inside her brain.

Pavarotti_"nessun_dorma" — Pavarotti "nessun dorma"

Nessun dorma

Goofs

At the beginning of the episode, Andie is seemingly injecting herself with an empty syringe.
House said he took 1,000mg of Benadryl. That's forty 25mg capsules. That much would likely result in tachycardia, irregular heart rhythm and likely death.
When House casually tosses his iPod into a chair, he's being far too rough with it. A shock of that nature would most likely damage the internal hard drive. In addition, he uses the iPod incorrectly. To change from Nessun dorma to Andie's heartbeat on that model, he should hit the "track change" button above the scroll wheel. Instead, he rotates the thumb counterclockwise, which would lower the volume.
During the procedure, they're using an MRI in a room with metal clamps.
The motorcycle House rides at the end of the episode is an Aprilia RSV1000 V-Twin, but the motorcycle sounds are from an inline 4.

Music

In The Deep, during the operation, performed by Kathleen York
Beautiful, performed by Christina Aguilera with Sasha Pieterse singing along at the beginning and Elvis Costello in a version specially commissioned for the episode at the end.
Nessun dorma (None shall sleep) from the opera Turandot, performed by Bruce Sledge

Quotes

Cast

Release Dates

United States - September 20, 2005 on Fox
Canada - September 20, 2005 on Global
Italy - September 3, 2006
Germany - October 24, 2006
Estonia - February 9, 2007
Hungary - March 28, 2007
France - April 19, 2007
Japan - July 3, 2007
Finland - September 20, 2007

In Other Languages

France and Quebec - Leçon d'espoir (Eng. Lesson of Hope)
Spanish - Autopsia (Eng. Autopsy)

Links

Video

Previous episode:
Acceptance

Autopsy

Next episode:
Humpty Dumpty

@@ Line 81: / Line 81: @@
 *Chase's age is given as 30, but in an earlier episode, it was given as 26. Jesse Spencer was 26 at the time the episode was released.
 *We don't see House take [[vicodin]] in this episode, but he does admit taking some after Andie's mom approves the procedure, along with other medications for his hay fever.
+*House uses an English variation of the hospital's motto "''Omnes te moriturum amant''" when talking about Andie (If you're dying, suddenly everybody loves you).
 *House uses a lot of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_language Yiddish]. "Rivkah" is the modern Hebrew for "Rebecca". "Gemutlich" is "comfortable" or "friendly" - a borrow from German. "Shanda" is used to express shame, particularly when Jews are embarrased before non-Jews.  Roughly, he's saying that the clinic patient is ashamed he's not [[circumcision|circumcised]] and wanted to go through with it to make his girlfriend happy.
 *House is right that prostitutes do not kiss their clients on the mouth. It's not an intimacy problem - they just want to avoid catching a [[common cold|cold]], [[influenza]], [[Mononucleosis|mononucleosis]] or other diseases that are transmitted in that manner.