A male servant or junior official who works in a house or large institution, or a medical resident in a hospital.
Compound of 'house' (Old English 'hūs') and 'man' (Old English 'mann'). The term evolved to mean a man who works in/for a house, with different specialized meanings in different contexts.
In British hospitals, a 'houseman' was the lowest-ranking doctor doing grunt work—the term stuck around for decades even though it's now considered old-fashioned, which is why reading older British medical novels is like learning an entire vocabulary of hospital hierarchy that's totally disappeared.
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