Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

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Bertrand Edward Dawson

Bertrand Edward Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn (born March 9, 1864 in Croydon , † March 7, 1945 in London ) was a British medic. Dawson was, among other things, personal physician of the British royal family and president of the Royal College of Physicians .

Life and activity

Dawson was the fourth son of the architect Henry Dawson and his wife Frances, nee Wheeler. He attended St. Paul's School in London and then from 1879 University College London , which he left in 1888 with a Bachelor of Science degree. This was followed by training as a doctor at the Royal London Hospital . Here he earned a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in 1893.

After Dawson had worked as a doctor for a few years, he was accepted as a doctor in the service of the British royal family in 1907. Officially, he was called a physician-extraordinary for King Edward VII. In 1910, under the new King George V , he was elevated to the rank of physician-in-ordinary . Dawson had been a member of the Royal College of Surgeons since 1890 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians since 1903 .

During World War I (November 1914) Dawson received the rank of Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps . From 1915 to 1919 he was employed as a medic on the Western Front and promoted to the rank of major-general.

After the war, Dawson continued to be personal physician to King George V until 1936. In addition, he was President of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1928 to 1930 and President of the Royal College of Physicians from 1930 to 1937.

Dawson also looked after George V on his deathbed on January 20, 1936, and after it became inevitable, hastened his death by a few hours by injecting the king with a lethal mixture of cocaine and morphine into a jugular vein. Dawson documented the active euthanasia he performed in his diary, which was only published in 1986. There he justified the decision to hasten the king's death with the fact that he wanted to spare him a protracted and humiliating agony and in this way wanted to protect the dignity of the monarch in his phase of agony and to spare the nerves of the other people present in the death room, by sparing them such a spectacle. In addition, as he goes on to write in his diary, Dawson wanted the speeding up to ensure that the king's death would come early enough to be announced in the morning's edition of the Times , which he considered the most important and worthy newspaper in the country can. If death occurred later, Dawson feared that the public would learn about it through a less important newspaper.

Although Dawson's role in the king's death only became a certainty decades later, even contemporaries vaguely suspected that the personal physician had "helped" with the king's death. A Knittel verse that was widespread at the time was : "Lord Dawson of Penn / Killed many men./ That's why we sing / 'God Save the King'".

In a vote in the House of Lords in 1936 discussing a bill on euthanasia , Dawson opposed legalized euthanasia on the grounds that this should be a decision that was in the prerogative of the attending physician and not through codified legal texts should be regulated.

In 1939, Dawson signed an appeal to the German people, initiated by the British government, to renounce National Socialist rule, which was repeatedly read out on the BBC's international channels. Probably for this reason, he was classified as an enemy of the Nazi state by the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin in the spring of 1940 and, with reference to his signature, placed under the above-mentioned appeal on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were to be found in the event of a successful invasion and occupation British island by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

Honors

In 1920 Dawson was raised to hereditary nobility as Baron Dawson of Penn , of Penn in the County of Buckingham, and thus became a member of the House of Lords . On October 30, 1936, the survey to Viscount Dawson of Penn , of Penn in the County of Buckingham followed.

In 1929 Dawson became a member of the British Privy Council .

He was also Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (1911), Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (1918), Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (1919) and Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (April 1926).

family

Dawson married Minnie Ethel Yarrow on December 18, 1900. With this he had three daughters: Sybil Frances Dawson (1904–1977), Ursula Margaret Dawson (1907–1999) and Rosemary Monica Dawson (1913–1998). Since he had no son, his nobility titles expired with his death.

literature

• Stephen Lock: Dawson, Bertrand Edward, Viscount Dawson of Penn (1864-1945) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lord Dawson Of Penn: Hitler's Black Book - information for Lord Dawson Of Penn ( Info )
2. ^ The London Gazette : (Supplement) No. 31712, p. 1 , December 30, 1919.
3. ^ The London Gazette: No. 34337, p. 7023 , November 3, 1936.