Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

Bertrand Edward Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn GCVO KCB KCMG PC FRCP (9 March 1864–7 March 1945) was a doctor to the British Royal Family.

Early years
Dawson was born in Croydon. He joined St Paul's School in London in 1877 and University College, London in 1879.

Career
After graduation he worked as a physician for several years and married Minnie Yarrow (a daughter of the future Sir Alfred Yarrow, 1st Baronet) in 1900 and they had three children:
 * Honourable Sybil Frances Dawson (1904–1977), married the future David Eccles, 1st Viscount Eccles and had issue.
 * Honourable Ursula Margaret Dawson (1907–1999), married Ian Frank Bowater (a future Lord Mayor of London) and had issue.
 * Honourable Rosemary Monica Dawson (born 1913), married Sir John Wrightson, 3rd Baronet.

Dawson then joined the Royal Household as a physician-extraordinary to King Edward VII and was promoted to a physician-in-ordinary under King George V in 1914. He served on the Western Front in France during World War I from 1915 to 1919 with the rank of Major-General (he had served as a Royal Army Medical Corps officer in the Territorial Force for many years), noticing the poor physical fitness of British troops and conducted research into trench fever. Dawson later published a report in 1920 whilst he was Chairman of the Consultive Council on Medical and Allied Services and the report later became a cornerstone of the future National Health Service when it was set up in 1948. In the New Year Honours of 1920, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dawson of Penn and became an active member of the House of Lords.

Euthanasia
On the night of the 20 January 1936, King George suffered a series of attacks of bronchitis and his end was hastened by Lord Dawson, who gave him a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine.


 * "At about 11 o'clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers and keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr.3/4 and shortly afterwards cocaine gr. 1 into the distended jugular vein."

Dawson's public stance on euthanasia was expressed later that year when he opposed a move in the Lords to legalise it because it "belongs to the wisdom and conscience of the medical profession and not to the realm of law." The manner of King George's death would have been considered high treason if known at the time. Fifty years after his own death in 1945 the contents of his diary were made public for the first time, in which he clearly acknowledged what he had done in bringing about the early death of the King and his motivation for doing so.

Further career
In October 1936 he was promoted to Viscount Dawson of Penn and remained in the Medical Households of King Edward VIII and King George VI and treated numerous members of the Royal Family and foreign monarchs including Queen Maud of Norway and King Leopold III of Belgium. Lord Dawson later died in 1945 and, without male heirs, his titles became extinct.