This was my first House episode

When House messed with the formula, it showed its addictive side � TV Roundtable � The A.V. Club: “Three Stories,” the penultimate episode of the first season, is a break in the show’s usual case-of-the-week formula, intended to address the question: Who is House, and how did he get that way? It’s also a giant fishhook, intended to snag the audience and keep them panting for the show’s return in the fall. House’s boss Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) begs him to fill in for a sick doctor who’s supposed to lecture some med students on the diagnostician’s art, and House agrees to do it in order to get off clinic duty for a couple of hours. He then regales the students with what amounts to three mini-episodes of House, which we see acted out in flashback. In one, a middle-aged farmer with some kind of injury that’s eating the flesh off his leg claims to have been bitten by a rattlesnake. House, however, deduces that the patient is really trying to take a bullet for the dog he loves. In the second, a teenage girl who’s a star volleyball player also has a mysterious leg ailment, and in the third, a man arrives in the hospital complaining of leg pain, but is taken for a junkie just trawling for narcotics.