If symptoms

persist. . .

DR R— CALLED me from the prison last week to ask whether I could do sick parade the following day. I am a busy man, and said it might be rather difficult to fit it in; but Dr R— said that the prison was so desperate for my assis- tance that I could start at any time I chose, however inconvenient for every- one else.

I fell for his soft soap and agreed, naming an unusual hour. In prison, how- ever, doctors propose, but it is the warders who dispose. As a matter of principle, they were not ready for me when I arrived and I spent the first half- hour chatting over stewed tea with a warder and a student nurse from the local teaching hospital who had been seconded to the prison for a day to learn What Life Is All About.

The nurse was sweet and innocent, so the warder decided to shock her with stories of drug addiction among the pris- oners.

'But how do they get the drugs into prison?' she asked.

'Any way they can,' said the warder, revelling in the reaction he was produc- ing. 'I was on duty once at visiting time when I heard a baby crying, screaming like you never heard. The mother had stuffed its vagina with drugs to bring the father.'

The nurse gasped and looked at the floor.

'There's nothing cons won't do, is there, doctor? Nothing. They even get their wives to put LSD behind the stamps on the letters what they send.'

My first patient arrived, walking with the aid of a stick, which he used (so I was told) only when consulting his medi- cal adviser. His head was shaven and his scalp was as scarred as an old Stafford- shire bull terrier's. His skin was tattooed with the iconography of inchoate hate.

'E's a awkward customer, this one, doctor,' whispered the warder in my ear. 'Watch 'ow you 'andle 'im.'

The prisoner was on hunger strike unto death because he had been given five years for `nothink'. A man of strong principle, he said he wasn't doing five years for nothink, not for nobody.

I enquired into the precise nature of this nullity, and it turned out to be the slicing up of a man's face with a carving knife.

'But it weren't nothink compared with what the other fella was doing, doctor. He was attacking two girls wiv a hatchet.' 'I suppose you call that killing two birds with one axe,' I remarked with macabre flippancy.

'Anyway, doctor, I've got this phlegm. The last time I had it my heart stopped and they had to start it again with the electric shocks. I was brought back from the dead, only my chest looked as if it had been under the f—ing grill after what they done to me. Then the consul- tant said I was a junkie and sent me out of hospital straight after I come round. The nurses was in uproar about it, they said they never seen nothink so inhu- man. I'm never going back to that bas- tard, pardon my French.'

Faute de mieux, I took his pulse.

`Blirney,' he said, utterly disarmed. 'You're a proper doctor.' He left quietly, his limp cured. 'I fought you 'andled 'im very well, doctor,' said the warder — 'igh praise hindeed.

Theodore Dalrymple