Ice-blooded tempers and go-to-hell dispositions aren’t confined to any one profession, but for sheer cussedness it’s hard to beat doctors. (Yes, yes, I know – before my doctor friends or their spouses fire off offended letters to the editor, I hereby freely admit newspaper publishers are cranky, spoiled, bubble-headed egomaniacs who would have gone to medical school if only our math scores had been better.)

My uncle, a retired publisher, recently reminded me of the case of Dr. Julius Schuelke, a high-octane German physician who took up practice in my Wyoming hometown of Lander back in the 1880s. Hailed as best doctor in all the surrounding country, Schuelke was an accomplished medical high-wire artist who famously cured a local man of facial cancer at a time when it would otherwise have been an automatic death sentence.

Speaking of death sentences, that’s probably what Dr. Schuelke faced in 1890 after being indicted for murder in record time by a grand jury that included my great-great-grandfather.

Echoing a complaint that has resounded through the pharmacy business for as long as there have been doctors, the town druggist – a man named Sullivan – told a few too many gossipy neighbors that Dr. Schuelke’s appallingly messy prescriptions were going to kill a patient someday. The German’s handwriting may have been a symptom of a bigger problem: Acting out another familiar theme, Dr. Schuelke was said to be addicted to narcotics.

Word got back to Dr. Schuelke. Strapping on his six-shooter, he marched a block down the street to Choo’s barbershop, confronting Sullivan as he sat in the chair. Noticing or imagining Sullivan’s hands moving beneath the barber’s cloth and thinking he was reaching for a gun, Dr. Schuelke drilled the unarmed man right between the eyes.

The good doctor was hauled off to county jail. After just one night behind bars, however, local authorities realized they needed him so badly they turned him loose. A few weeks later, with what can be imagined as a community sigh of “Aw, to heck with it,” he was acquitted.

In a freakish occurrence that hasn’t happened since M*A*S*H ended production in 1983, I find myself relishing the nation’s top-rated TV show, House.

It’s on Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul whose ruthless egotism makes Citizen Kane look modest as Mother Teresa. (Although I find myself somewhat disarmed in reading that Murdoch once played himself on The Simpsons, in an episode where Homer runs into a guy at the Super Bowl who introduces himself: “I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant!”)

Dr. Gregory House is perhaps the most unapologetically despicable character in television history. Like Dr. Schuelke, House is so irreplaceable as a medical puzzle-solver that his colleagues and society are compelled to put up with shockingly boorish behavior, sarcasm and escalating self-destruction. Addicted to prescription pain drugs after a leg injury, House accepts no authority but his own, pushing his body past all limits and punishing anybody who dares to care about him.

Weird to say, but House is almost Shakespearean – not only in its dramatic themes but in its humor. Lead actor Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe Award for best television performance and deserves to go down in the history books for most wicked … and most funny. In some ways, Laurie and House resemble Alan Alda and Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H, except that House’s acidic wit would have swiftly resulted in his own murder by the easy-going, martini-swilling surgeons of the Korean war zone.

And what of Dr. Schuelke? A few years after the events recounted here, he opened a successful health spa at Wyoming’s famed Thermopolis hot springs, which he named thermae, Latin for hot baths or springs, and polis, Greek for city.

High above the modern highway that now snakes through Wind River Canyon just south of Thermopolis, a dirt track once ascended Bird’s Eye Pass. (The homesteader who first brought cattle into the Owl Creek Mountains branded them with a circle with a dot in the center, and the Indians thought it looked like a bird’s eye.)

Traveling over the pass with a woman who might or might not have been his wife, Dr. Schuelke somehow managed to fall from the stagecoach, suffering fatal injuries. Though he deliberately took one human life, he doubtless saved hundreds. But he couldn’t save himself – to this day, people speculate he was on drugs the day he finally fell beneath the spinning wheels.

It will be fascinating to see if the fictional Dr. House finds his own peace and redemption in the end.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook Observer.