My association with professor Yousuf goes back to the days when I was a third-year medical student at GMC Srinagar. Fresh from the boring and back-breaking first professional examination, we were excited to move around the hospital corridors in white-coats with stethoscopes dangling over our shoulders. We peeped into the wards, watched groups of eminent clinicians making morning rounds and felt sorry for the sick patients on tubes and pipes. There was an unusual excitement and an unknown fear. Where have I landed? What am I to do here? Amid this uncertainty and apprehension, barely a few days into our new environment, we were huddled around a stroke patient, nervously struggling to take the clinical history, when a handsome, professionally dressed man approached us and asked, “Are you the new third-years?” ‘Yes sir’, we replied in unison. While he stood beside the patient, he asked us to be arranged in an arc so that he could see each one of us. He analyzed scientifically the raw history we had taken highlighting the importance of each component of history-taking. History could tell us whether the stroke was embolic, thrombotic or hemorrhagic-we learnt in our first clinical class with him. New and naive as we were, he demonstrated to us all the signs the patient had. We were absorbed in his clinical class, excited to watch him demonstrate pendular reflexes and ‘finger-nose’ test. He demonstrated and we watched, he dictated and we obeyed, he asked and we answered. He brought in energy and electric excitement. He made us to think logically, brought us closer to science, and a little close to medicine. That was Prof. Mohammad Yousuf Bhat -a ‘Marshal’ they called him- the vibrant, energetic clinician who helped to ignite that flame of passion for medicine in our weak and terrified hearts. 

Prof. Yousuf’s theory classes were enthralling, exciting and stimulating. He taught medicine with heart and mind - time paused, students froze while he spoke controlling the entire class. There was a magical synchrony between the resonance of his powerful voice, the rhythmic tap of his shoes, and the graceful movements of his hands—as though his voice, his footsteps, and his gestures were all part of the same rhythm. Every student attended his lectures-the studious ones, the sharp ones, the impatient ones, the vagabonds, the Romeos and all the ‘difficult to handle’ Darbadari students who too would get overwhelmed by his magic. His words were etched in memory, engraved in heart and remembered with pleasure by students of all types. While he taught, he had his mission in mind. When asked as to how he could hold the attention of so many students and deliver every bit to perfection, he would acknowledge that before every lecture he would practice hard, read well, rehearse what he had to say and many times do solo sessions with himself in his garden. No wonder such commitment to teaching fetched him the distinction of being the ‘best teacher in medicine’ across all the students who were trained in that era at GMC........

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