Item from House M.D. by David Shore
The glass whiteboard where House writes the differential diagnosis — symptoms on one side, hypotheses on the other, and the answer somewhere in the space between what's been eliminated and what remains.
The whiteboard is the show's central artifact. Every case starts with House writing the first symptom on the glass. The team adds more. They propose diagnoses. House crosses them out as tests eliminate possibilities. The whiteboard is a visual representation of Sherlock Holmes's axiom: 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' The diagnostic process the whiteboard represents is the show's gameplay loop: present with mystery symptoms, generate differential diagnoses, test and eliminate, wrong several times, epiphany triggered by unrelated observation, correct diagnosis, patient saved (usually). The whiteboard tracks this process in real time, and by the end of a case, it's a battlefield of crossed-out wrong answers surrounding the one right one.
A large glass dry-erase board mounted in the diagnostics conference room. Clear glass with symptoms and diagnoses written in colored markers — typically blue or black for symptoms, red for diagnoses being tested, lines crossing out eliminated possibilities. The board is visible through the glass walls of the conference room, making the diagnostic process a spectator sport.
Also known as: The Whiteboard, DDx Board, The Differential Board, The Glass Board