Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

Bertrand Edward Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn, (9 March 1864 – 7 March 1945) was a physician to the British royal family and President of the Royal College of Physicians from 1931 to 1937. He is known for his responsibility in the death of George V, who under his care was injected with a fatal dose of cocaine and morphine to hasten his death.

He entered St Paul's School in London in 1877 and University College London in 1879, graduating in 1888 with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. In 1907, Dawson joined the Royal Household as a physician-extraordinary to King Edward VII, an office he held until 1910, when he was promoted to a physician-in-ordinary under King George V until 1914. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1911. Following the outbreak of World War I, he was given the rank of colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps in November 1914. He served on the Western Front in France from 1915 to 1919, rising to 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 conducting research into trench fever. He was mentioned in dispatches.

He held the office of Physician-in-Ordinary to King George V until 1936 and was appointed Knight of Grace in the Venerable Order of Saint John and Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1916, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) in the 1918 New Year Honours, and Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1919.

Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services Dawson was commissioned whilst he was Chairman of the Consultative Council on Medical and Allied Services in 1919 by Christopher Addison, the first British Minister of Health to produce a report on "schemes requisite for the systematised provision of such forms of medical and allied services as should, in the opinion of the Council, be available for the inhabitants of a given area". An Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services (the so-called Dawson report) was published in 1920, though no further report ever appeared. The report laid down details plans for a network of Primary and Secondary Health Centres, together with architectural drawings of different sorts of centres. The report was very influential in debates about the National Health Service when it was set up in 1948.

Titles In the 1920 New Year Honours, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dawson of Penn, of Penn, in the County of Buckinghamshire and became an active member of the House of Lords. In April 1926 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB), and he was appointed to the Privy Council in the 1929 Birthday Honours.

He held the office of President of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1928 to 1930 and President of the Royal College of Physicians from 1931 to 1938. Dawson's private diary, unearthed after his death and made public in 1986, reveals that the King's last words, a mumbled "God damn you!", were addressed to his nurse, Catherine Black, when she gave him a sedative that night. Dawson, who supported the "gentle growth of euthanasia" but opposed a 1936 Voluntary Euthanasia (Legalisation) Bill in the Lords, admitted in the diary that he ended the King's life with a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine:

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