June 18, 1981

THE house-museum is a special breed of cultural artifact, not quite a house, and not quite a museum, either. It has neither the sense of domesticity of a true residence nor the air of a Great Institution that so many museums possess. It is something oddly in between. Most house-museums were, of course, houses - they were built to be lived in, and part of their appeal is in our wonderment that the processes of daily life could actually go on within such quarters, so far from a normal domestic environment as they usually are. Who could imagine sipping morning coffee within what is now the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue, for example, or pondering a choice of wardrobe within Fenway Court, the Isabella Stuart Gardner house that is now one of Boston's most beloved museums? And the sense of absolute awe that confronts the visitor to the immense and ornate palaces of such places as Newport is surely among the major attractions these buildings hold for us. The Vanderbilt houses are notable examples of the work of Richard Morris Hunt and can be called distinguished architecture, but even the most serious architectural scholar must admit to a certain degree of voyeuristic pleasure when he or she visits these marbled quarters. Part of the appeal, in other words, is the amusement of seeing how the rich once lived.

Because of an editing error, an article in some editions of The Times yesterday incorrectly stated the number of doctors represented by the National Medical Association. The organization represents about 9,300 of the nation's black physicians.

The United States and China are jointly operating an electronic intelligence-gathering station in China to monitor Soviet missile tests, according to senior American officials. The facility was opened last year in a remote, mountainous region of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China, near the Soviet border. Two key Soviet missile-testing bases are at Leninsk, near the Aral Sea, and at Sary-Shagan, near Lake Balkhash. Leninsk is 500 miles from the nearest point on the Chinese border, Sary-Shagan 300 miles.

''Congress itself defined the basic relationship between costs and benefits, by placing the 'benefit' of worker health above all other considerations save those making attainment of this 'benefit' unachievable.

The Supreme Court upheld standards limiting worker exposure to cotton dust, rejecting industry contentions that regulatory costs must be balanced against benefits and dealing a blow to the Reagan Administration's antiregulation agenda. (Page A1.) Textile executives expressed disappointment with the ruling. (D5.) The court also upheld a Federal law allowing safety inspectors to conduct surprise inspections of mines and quarries without warrants. (B9.) Many conservative House Democrats said they would support the party leadership and oppose the White House on specific budget cuts. (A1.) The Democratic majority of the House Ways and Means Committee adopted a tax-cut plan centered on cuts in corporate income taxes and a one-year write-off of investment in equipment and vehicles. The plan would reduce the corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 34 percent between 1984 and 1987. (D1.)