Hektoen International
Bertrand Dawson, Lord Dawson of Penn (1864-1945), was the most eminent British doctor in the years between the two world wars. He was both a skilled medical politician (twice president of the British Medical Association, eight-times president of the Royal College of Physicians) and a brilliantly successful private practitioner. His bedside manner was impeccable; he had the enviable ability to inspire confidence in his patients and was said to possess a “Himalayan calm.” Dawson was not universally adored, however. Canon F.A. Iremonger, the Dean of Lichfield, wrote that Dawson “seemed to me almost too handsome, too soigné, too much a man of the world.”1
Dawson’s most prominent patient was George V. The King fell seriously ill in November 1928 with streptococcal pneumonia and septicemia. In this pre-antibiotic era, the patient was treated at home—“home” being Buckingham Palace. Dawson called in several eminent doctors, including the Regius Professors of Physic at Oxford and Cambridge. “When a King is the patient,” wrote the surgeon and writer R. Scott Stevenson, “the inclination is always to spread the responsibility.”2 In all, thirteen doctors were involved in the case; daily bulletins were issued, all signed by Dawson. After three weeks, the King showed no sign of improvement, and one of his nurses, Sister Catherine Black, concluded that he was dying. “The doctors,” she later wrote, “had done everything that could be done. Human skill ended there.”1 But Dawson was convinced that there must be an empyema, and on December 12 he carried out a needle aspiration of the right lung, draining 16oz of pus. That evening, the thoracic surgeon Sir Hugh Rigby performed a formal drainage of the abscess, with resection of two ribs.
Although George V was an irritable man and a bad patient, he slowly recovered. On the 9th of February 1929, he was moved to Craigwell House in Bognor on the Sussex coast. Dawson thought the sea air would aid the King’s recovery. The town later successfully petitioned George V to have the suffix “Regis” attached in honor of its role in his recovery, and thereafter was known as Bognor Regis. On February 12, Dawson permitted the King—a heavy smoker—his first cigarette. Over three months in Bognor he gradually recovered, and in May was moved to Windsor Castle. Later that month, however, George V relapsed, with a localized abscess at the site of his thoracotomy. The abscess burst on May 31; it was rumored that this discharge was caused by the King’s over-vigorous laughter in response to a ribald joke told by the Labour politician, Jimmy Thomas. (Thomas, who rose from railwayman to cabinet minister, was an unlikely intimate of this dour Hanoverian.)
