The Fish

The Fish is a 2002 novel about a doctor who takes a job he thinks he understands. Dr. Tom Winfohr is newly married when he moves to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to start his new life as Medical Director at the state penitentiary. The publisher's blurb says he has no reason to suspect the trouble waiting for him there.

That trouble is a surprisingly large prison drug trade. Tom is unwittingly lured into it, and he soon finds his honor, his love and his safety all threatened. Our catalogue description frames the question as a hook: can an unsuspecting prison doctor extricate himself from a drug ring once he is caught in it? The blurb calls it a fast moving novel about a horrifying situation with no obvious way out.

Joe Wise knew the setting from his own work. The same blurb says he served for two years as Medical Director of the New Mexico Penitentiary. Western Reflections published the novel in 2002, and Open Library files it under drug traffic, prison physicians and fiction.

The Fish is for readers who like thrillers with a professional at the center, especially stories set in prisons or medicine. New Mexico readers will recognize Santa Fe as the starting point. It also suits anyone curious about what happens when a person trained to help others is trapped by an illegal trade he never meant to join. The book deals with drugs and threats of violence, so it is aimed at adults. Libraries with crime fiction or Southwest fiction shelves can use it.

Joe Wise is a cardiologist by training, and a publisher's note says he spent two years as Medical Director of the New Mexico Penitentiary. He had already published two novels before this one, the award-winning Cannibal Plateau and the Fremont expedition story In the Moro. We cannot say how much of the plot drew on his own days at the prison, only that he knew the job. More of his work is gathered on his author page.

More about Joe Wise, M.D. →

Prison medicine has a short modern history. Until about 1970, medical care in American jails and prisons was run by county sheriffs or prison wardens, and the wider medical community paid it little attention. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was the exception, staffing its medical needs with Public Health Service physicians. In 1972 the American Medical Association surveyed medical services in prisons and jails and published a report documenting how inadequate they were.

The law followed. In 1976 the Supreme Court decided Estelle v. Gamble, a Texas case, and that ruling and later ones established that prisoners have a constitutional right to health care comparable to what the outside community receives. Today the Bureau of Prisons says its Health Services Division handles medical, dental and mental health care for people in custody, with more than 3,000 health care positions, about 550 of them Public Health Service officers. The Fish is set in a state system, so this is general background rather than a map of the novel.

Source: Encyclopedia.com: Prison Health