Hugh Laurie stars as brilliant New Jersey medic Dr Gregory House in the fourth series of the Emmyand Golden Globe-winning medical drama. This week, the team tackles the unusual case of a patient who is just too nice. Is there a medical reason for his sickly sweet personality, or is it possible that he is just naturally kind-spirited?

Mild-mannered Jeff is brought into the hospital presenting with fainting spells and dysgeusia, a condition that affects the sense of taste. Jeff is married to one of the nurses at the hospital and is widely known by all to be a particularly agreeable guy. When House tests Jeff with his usual jibes, he fails to raise the patient’s ire and becomes immediately suspicious. House lists Jeff’s niceness as a symptom of his mystery illness, but Foreman refuses to accept this. “You want it to be a symptom because then we’re supposed to be jerks,” he observes, “which means you don’t even have to try to be nice.” But House insists he is right and orders a toxin investigation be carried out in Jeff’s home.

At Jeff’s house, Kutner discovers a bottle of hydrofluoric acid, which is known to cause fainting and affect the tastebuds. As Jeff cleans carpets for a living, he would have been exposed to high amounts of the chemical. However, House points out that there are problems with this theory. Hydrofluoric acid causes depleted calcium levels, but Jeff’s are normal. From this information, House concludes that Jeff’s calcium levels must have been elevated to start with. House diagnoses Williams syndrome, a condition that is linked to high levels of the mineral. To add weight to his verdict, House points out that another hallmark of Williams is that its sufferers are missing the ‘suspicion’ gene. “He’s nice in the sense that your toaster is nice for making you breakfast,” House explains. “It’s the only thing his wiring will let him do.”

While the doctors are debating the fact that Jeff does not display all of the syndrome’s characteristics, he suffers a stroke. It is now clear that there is something else wrong with the patient, and Kutner hits upon another possibility – he may have neurosyphilis. The tests come back positive, so Jeff is put on a course of penicillin. Initially it appears to be working – his personality is changing, which means the lesions on his brain caused by the syphilis are healing. Noting Jeff’s new-found aggression, House makes the dubious observation that “syphilis prevents domestic violence”.

But when Kutner sees the change in Jeff, a completely different idea dawns on him. Could House’s hostile temperament be related to syphilis, just as Jeff’s placid nature was? In the lab, he finds definitive proof that House does indeed have syphilis. It seems that House’s personality could be nothing more than the symptom of a disease. While the team grapples with this shocking relevation, Jeff’s health takes a turn for the worse as he goes into cardiac arrest. With no new theories to hand, it is back to the drawing board for House. Will he be forced to admit that perhaps people can be nice for no reason?

Also this week, House and Amber enter into a ‘custody battle’ when House claims that Wilson’s girlfriend is monopolising his best buddy’s time. After House wins a small victory by securing Wilson’s Wednesday nights, he attempts to get his friend drunk so he will not be of much use to Amber when he gets home. But Amber latches on to House’s games and introduces a penalty clause into their agreement. She has made it clear that she is not about to let House come between her and her man. As the two lock horns, could it be that Amber and House have met their match in each other?