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In this brilliant memoir of a year in the life of a prison doctor, Dr Yousaf has followed the literary traditions of some of the very best doctor-writers in the past. Bulgakov's A Country Doctor's Notebook comes to mind. And he has accomplished this task with great success.
I read this book in two sittings and I am not known for quick reading. Dr Yousaf has expressed himself exquisitely, citing the dire conditions which house prisoners in some of our most overcrowded prisons across the country. He speaks with profound humanity of each and every patient encounter. The reader follows him closely as he navigates his way from the gate of this prison, not prepared for what is to follow, through the dirt yards where seagulls and “crack rats” squabble over discarded food and sewage, into the very heart of the prison blocks, where institutionally and socially marginalised, poverty stricken, traumatised, uneducated, violent prisoners live a life that demonises them even further. The key to it, he writes, from what he learns from others, is to treat them as normal people and not “monsters”. And you feel the tensions within him and within the institution, as the prisoners test this treatment of them as “normal people”.
With his own personal medical style of deference, he manages to humanise his patients and all aspects of their presentation—whether it is as medication-seekers asserting thuggish authority and violence to have their needs met, or if it is as victims needing care and listening. I was most struck by this. Dr Yousaf captures both the perpetrator and the victim selves of his patients in his depiction of them—even as he makes it a point of technique to never ask them what they have done, unless they volunteer it themselves. This offers him a psychological space to consider them without moral judgement and it is what is needed when one is subject to such pressing demands all the time.
The numerous patients we follow—Mr R, Mr V, the unforgettable Mr Lovell who we meet in