When a Royal Physician Killed a King to Get His Death into the Morning News--Euthanasia Story #1

Almost thirty years ago, news broke on November 27, 1986 that Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather had been involuntarily euthanized fifty years earlier, on January 20, 1936, when she was nine years old and he was seventy. The deed had been done by the Lord Dawson of Penn, the king's physician.

King George V had called her Lilibet. She had called him Grandpa England. The king had been so fond of his oldest granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, that the Bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, was astonished one day when he arrived for an audience to find the king crawling about with the little princess on all fours.

“P'incess is three,” a Time magazine article on April 1929 about "Princess Lilybet"  reported, “No one else except the Queen rides out so often with the King ....”

May 16, 1935: nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth waved from the Buckingham Palace balcony during her Grandpa England’s Silver Jubilee celebration, eight months before his death

In 1986 when the truth came out about the circumstances leading to the death of her grandfather King George VI, reporters were not able to reach the Queen to find out her reaction. A Buckingham Palace spokesman replied to those who called, “It happened a long time ago, and all those concerned are now dead."

A Murder of Convenience

Most of the world only came to know about the involuntary euthanasia of the King of England in 1936 because the notes of Lord Dawson, the royal physician who killed the king, were finally revealed by his biographer in 1986. His biographer had discovered those notes when he was writing his life of Lord Dawson in 1950, but he and Lord Dawson’s widow decided not to include the king’s euthanasia in the biography.

King George V’s final words had been publicized as, "How is the Empire?” and his reported words were often repeated with reverence and sorrow for how touching it was that the king was concerned for the health of the realm as he lay dying. But, according to Lord Dawson’s notes, the king’s final words actually had been, "G-d damn you!" and they were addressed to his nurse, while she was injecting him under the supervision of Lord Dawson with a non-fatal dose of morphine to put him to sleep. 

I wonder, did he curse at his nurse because he suspected what they were going to do? After that first shot of morphine that evening, he never regained consciousness again.

The "mercy" killing took place later that evening. At 9:30, Lord Dawson wrote a medical bulletin that declared, ''The King's life is moving peacefully toward its close.”

After the king was unconscious, Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came and prayed by the king's bedside. After the Archbishop left, Lord Dawson prepared two fatal injections. The king’s nurse refused to cooperate, so Dawson administered the injections, the first containing three-quarters of a gram of morphine and the second containing one gram of cocaine.

According to his notes, Dawson coolly arranged the king’s death to occur before midnight, in order for the announcement to appear first in the morning edition of The Times and not in some lesser publication later in the day. To make doubly sure the story got into the Times morning edition the next day, Dawson phoned his wife in London during the evening to tell her to alert the Times to hold the press.

"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 [...]"—Lord Dawson’s physician’s notes

Lord Dawson's notes also stated that he had been told by Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales, who was to become Edward VIII, that they did not want the King's life needlessly prolonged if his illness was clearly fatal. 

If I could have been there, I would have pointed out to Lord Dawson that it hardly needs saying that there is a vast moral divide between "needlessly" prolonging a life and matter-of-factly ending a life on time to get the death notice placed in the morning edition of the times. 

The Times headline the next morning read “A Peaceful Ending at Midnight.”

The story “Death of the King” in the middle-brow Daily Express provided lots of details, some of which may have been fanciful. The story reported that the queen and the prince were at the king's bedside when he died. “Three doctors and three nurses, at his bedside almost constantly since the illness began, did all that they could do. [Sic] In vain. The King became unconscious; passed from unconsciousness to death.”
 

The Year of Three Kings

The Daily Express on the day after King George V’s death also noted that Princess Elizabeth was now second in line for the throne, after her father Albert, the Duke of York, but that if her uncle Edward, the new King Edward VIII, married and had children those children would take precedence. As it turned out, there were no worries needed in that department.


It’s a bit eerie how in 1935, King George VI had accurately predicted the fall of his son Edward: "After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months.” And he said this about his second son Albert and his beloved granddaughter Elizabeth: "I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne."


King Edward VIII threw over his throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson before the end of 1936. They never had children, but any children would not have been in line for the throne after his abdication. When Edward VIII abdicated before the end of 1936, Princess Elizabeth’s father, Albert (Bertie), became King George VI.

And that's how 1936 came to be referred to as The Year of Three Kings.

After Princess Elizabeth’s father King George VI, died in 1953, Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England.

During this year of Our Lord, 2016, which is the same year that marked the 80th anniversary of King George V's death on January 20, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 90th birthday on April 21 to great fanfare. In December of 2007, she had passed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch, and she became the longest-reigning British monarch in September of 2015. She is the longest-reigning queen regnant in the world, and the world's oldest reigning monarch. Not just for her endurance, but also for her decorous personal life and her high standards of service, her Grandpa England would have been quite pleased.

The Catholic Response

Some observers characterize the ongoing campaign for euthanasia as a laudable part of the attempt to free our society of all Christian moral principles and to replace what they say are irrational Christian principles with strict adherence to modern day rational opinions of what things are right and wrong. 

In contrast, the Catholic Church continues to point to what the Ten Commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill," repeats that our lives and deaths are in the hands of God, and teaches the unpopular and difficult truth that our sufferings can be joined with the sufferings of Christ to help redeem the world. 

To the modern ear it sounds like lunacy when we hear how many saints have told us that if we knew how good sufferings are for us spiritually and how much good that our suffering can do for the salvation of others, we would willingly seek them out.  

Following for example, is a long quote about the last days of Mother Mary Angelica, founder of EWTN, who was almost unique in our times in her teaching about the value of suffering that is united with the sufferings of Jesus.

.... Mother Angelica gave instructions to her caregivers to administer no pain relievers or drugs — despite her increasing suffering — that might unintentionally shorten her life because, as he said, she wanted to consciously suffer and offer her suffering to God.

“Most of us would not think that way. We would think, 'Get me out of here...' What's taken out of that picture is the love of God,” said [Father Joseph Mary] Wolfe as reported by AL.com.

"Catholics believe that every human life, young or old, healthy or sickly, carefree or suffering, has intrinsic value, meaning, and purpose in the eyes of God. Following St. Paul, who powerfully teaches that Christians actually partner with Christ in his redemptive action by offering their sufferings to God, Catholics see suffering not only as something to be patiently endured, but something that, when lovingly united to Christ, helps to redeem the world. 

"It was on Good Friday…Mother began to cry out early in the morning from the pain that she was having. She had a fracture in her bones because of the length of time she had been bedridden. They said you could hear it down the hallways, that she was crying out on Good Friday from what she was going through.

"These two people said to me she has excruciating pain. Well, do you know where that word excruciating comes from? Ex, from, cruce, from the cross. Excruciating pain,” he said.

Fr. Wolfe said that Mother Angelica saw suffering as an opportunity to make an act of love to God. 'She saw something that most of us don't see ... that she could say, you don't know the value of one new offering, one new act of love of God, one suffering that is united to Christ and offered to him. You don't know the value of that,' he said."--"Mother Angelica’s passion: How the EWTN foundress embraced suffering in her final days as a gift to God"

Outrage in 1986 and Beyond

Euthanasia may seem like a recently trending topic. However, as the killing of the king in 1936  proves, support for euthanasia in one form or another had currency at least among the English upper classes for a lot longer than we might realize. Support for euthanasia ebbs and flows.

By recording what he had done in his notes, Lord Dawson seems to have assumed that history would praise him as having been far-sighted in what he must have thought was his superior wisdom in ending the life of the King for the convenience of everyone around. But in 1986, the public reaction against Dawson’s murder of the King in the name of mercy killing was outrage. 

What had changed? At the end of the 1930s and the start of the 1940s dawned, many in the United Kingdom and the United States thought that euthanasia would become the norm. But when news of Nazi atrocities against mental patients, handicapped children, and many others who the Nazis thought of as undesirable, including, priests, Poles, and Jews, came out in the late 1940s, the euthanasia movement fell out of favor. Euthanasia proponents found it difficult for some decades afterwards to convince people that the form of euthanasia they supported was not the same as Nazi murder of the unfit, the inconvenient, and the undesired. The topic went underground pretty much for decades.

The kind of euthanasia Dawson practiced and advocated when he spoke against a bill legalizing euthanasia in the House of Lords (as will be described in more detail in my next post on this topic) was involuntary euthanasia, which was the putting to death of a patient by his doctor without the patient's knowledge and consent. In the late 20th and the start of the 21st century, public support has grown for another form of euthanasia, in which a doctor provides the means for the patient to end his or her own life, which is more correctly called assisted suicide. 

Public opinion also gradually became more accepting of allowing the doctor to take a patient's life, upon the request of the patient, which is voluntary euthanasia. 

Today most people are still opposed to the idea of involuntary euthanasia, as Lord Dawson practiced it, in principle, but first-person stories I've heard and experienced about how some hospices and hospitals routinely misuse morphine to induce death seem to indicate that involuntary euthanasia in the name of pain management is quite common and routinely accepted, without being talked about much.

The Truth Was Known, At Least By Some

Bizarrely enough, it came out that while Dawson was still alive, there had already been some scuttlebutt about the actual truth behind the so-called peaceful and presumably natural death of the King. In 1986, when the news came out in The Daily Telegraph of what the long-dead physician's notes revealed, a reader wrote in recalling a doggerel verse that had been in circulation during Dawson's life:
“Lord Dawson of Penn
Killed many men.
That's why we sing
'God Save the King.'”

Time Magazine’s cover story of Lord Dawson that appeared six years before King George V’s death, on
Monday, Sept. 01, 1930, and praised his services as the royal physician.

Stay tuned for more about Lord Dawson and the acceptance of euthanasia among the British upper classes in Euthanasia Story #2, coming soon.

When Should You Put Your Mom Down?

** Satire Alert ** Dr. Mors provides some practical guidance for dealing with some "difficult decisions" that many of us will face in the not too distant future about putting down our parents, if current trends continue.

How To Make A Decision You Never Want to Make
By Doctor Justin Mors, Psy.D.

Bill H. is a salesman for a computer networking equipment company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He's usually a pretty macho guy, but when his 72-year-old mother, Rose, told him that an oncologist had diagnosed her with cancer of the jaw and that nothing more could be done, Bill burst into tears. He knew what he had to decide, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Bill is a long-time client of mine. He called me later that night. Punctuated by sobs and silences, our conversation lasted nearly an hour. "I really don't know what to do," Bill said. "When do you put a parent down? How do you decide? She is old-fashioned, so she doesn’t believe in suicide.

"I know she is wrong, but somehow I can’t blame her for sticking to her old beliefs. She's from a generation that thought that it was a person's duty to fight for life until the last breath. I hate to euthanize her, and some of our family members would probably hate me for it, but I can’t bear to see her suffer." Bill is an only child, but he has some fundamentalist Christian cousins back in Texas who he knows are going to put up a big stink if they got wind of any notion of their aunt being put down.

Bill admitted he was making a lot of money in his programming job, and he told me that he had considered funding some experimental non-covered treatment that might help his mother out of his own pocket. But then he reconsidered. He decided she wouldn't want to be a burden on him.

He has his own life to live, his own bliss to follow. His goal is to retire when he is fifty, and by his canny investment strategies, he expects to be reaching his goal in two years. He never wanted to get married and have a family. And he's chomping at the bit to take advantage of the nest egg that he's been building so he can finally be free of a job. He's got a bucket list a mile long. He spends every vacation mountain climbing, and there are a lot of very big mountains on that bucket list. He knows his mother wouldn't want him to have to give up his dream on her account.

Caring for parents who are sick can cause huge amounts of stress. And we hate being forced to see our parents weak and ravaged by sickness when we would prefer to remember them as they were when they were full of vitality. We hate to see them suffer, we really do.

In our era, medical practice provides ways to mercifully shorten both their suffering and our own. But even so, oftentimes it is just plain painful to decide when to let them go. And sometimes we face opposition from narrow-minded people who don’t understand the progress we as a society have made in the area of compassionate end of life.

Bill and I spoke three or four times over the next couple of weeks while Bill agonized over the decision. The oncologist had urged him to euthanize his mother right away before Rose’s condition worsened, but Bill had clearly decided against that. He was apparently planning to put her down "when he was ready," and he thought he wasn't ready yet. One evening, he said he'd talked to a compassionate care counselor who'd told him that Rose would tell him, maybe not in words, when it was time to go, that Bill should watch and listen to for cues. He asked if I thought this was the right course.

At the time, I couldn't quite say. But if I had been able to articulate what I thought that night, it would have been this: Human beings, even when severely disabled or devastated by illness, avidly cling to life, sometimes even to the last breath, even when their lives have no quality at all--from a rational point of view.

They may cling to outmoded beliefs that it is wrong to end their own lives. Or they simply may not be able to decide for themselves when it's time to die, because especially under those circumstances they often aren’t capable of such abstract thought.

I personally didn't look to my wonderful parents, Ted and Betty, to tell me when it was time for them to go, one diagnosed with congestive heart failure, the other with colon cancer. The responsibility and the hard decision, it seemed to me, was mine, not theirs. Right after each of them was diagnosed, I made quiet arrangements with the end-of-life specialist to have him put them down before they endured any prolonged suffering—-my own choice, not a hard and fast recommendation for others.

In the context of this most personal decision a child ever makes, as in many other types of decisions, there are no universal truths.

Bill ended up postponing the decision for two months, until the tumor in his mother’s jaw had swollen to grapefruit size. When he called me again, I told him it was obviously time, and he finally went ahead and had her put to sleep.

Later, he called this the most wrenching period of his life. His relationship was floundering because Bill had been torn between the claims of his mother and his lover. His lover was upset about the time Bill spent attending to his mother’s affairs. His lover would complain about being left out because Bill started to visit Rose occasionally towards the end, even though she didn’t even recognize Bill some days. He told his lover that it didn't matter so much that she didn't recognize him, he recognized her, but that sentiment just elicited a snort from his partner.

After Bill finally ordered the euthanasia, in spite of the fact that he was convinced he had done the right thing, he missed his mother more than he ever imagined was possible. It was hard for me to relate to him at that point, his emotionalism seemed so unmanly and irrational. Bill cried deep wrenching sobs as he told me how much more horrible he felt because he knew he had no right to expect any sympathy.

Weeks later he told me he was plagued with recurrent dreams. In the dreams, he was a two year old with pneumonia. His mother was rocking him to comfort him while he fretted and feverishly pushed her away. When the dream ended, he would partly wake up. He would sit up in his bed and wail and reach his arms out for her just like he was still a little boy, until he would realize it was only a dream. Then he would continue to wail because he experienced the pain of her loss again every time the dream ended. His lover called him pathetic and began to sleep on the couch.

For months afterwards, Bill was depressed, and he could not bring himself to make all the sales calls he needed to meet his quotas. Predictably, the inheritance Bill had a right to expect from his mother’s estate had dwindled during the time he had delayed. And, as Bill had feared, his cousins were outraged when they somehow heard about the euthanasia. Fortunately, with the compassionate end-of-life laws on the books, there was nothing the cousins could do but complain.

The message in this is that his prolongation of his mother’s life took its toll on both his relationship and his finances. The wait had only delayed both the grief and the reckoning he eventually had to face with his narrow-minded relatives in any case. I frankly told him that was a shame.

To help your parents let go of life is as integral a part of the parent-child relationship as to make a cheering phone call on Mother’s and Father’s Day or to drop by for some of Mom’s home cooked food from time to time.

Above all, it is vital not to forget that our first responsibility is to take care of ourselves and get on with our lives.

One doctor I know tells patients that euthanasia should be performed "when the sick or aged person can no longer live a fully-human life. Sometimes the patient is willing and able to make the decision about when it is time to go—and sometimes only the child in conference with the end-of-life specialists knows when that really is."

The Netherlands has led the way for compassionate end of life care for many years. The same year that the laws were changed in our country to allow euthanasia and assisted suicide, tens of thousands of cases were performed in the Netherlands. Of these, about half the patients did not request or consent to being put down. One Amsterdam doctor explained in an interview that it would have been "rude" to discuss the matter with the patients, as they all "knew that their conditions were incurable."

One nurse practitioner in a rehabilitation center tells her patients, “I would not want to live if I couldn’t climb mountains any more.” She and the attending doctor, who have a responsibility to help keep the managed care costs down for the HMO that runs the center, find this can be very effective when she speaks to a bed-ridden or wheelchair bound invalid. More often than not, her patients will see her point, spare their children the difficult decision, and ask for an end-of-life injection themselves the next time the doctor comes around.

But I know other adult children—a growing number, according to doctors—who, like Bill, allow their parents with poor quality of life continue to live on and on, most of them because they have old-fashioned if not outright medieval beliefs. Like Bill’s fundamentalist cousins, they claim sanctimoniously that euthanasia is fake mercy.

They say that compassion should lead one to share another's pain, relieve it as far as possible, and comfort the ill and dying, not to kill a person when we cannot bear the person’s suffering. Note the use of the emotionally charged word “kill” instead of “compassionately end a life.”

Euthanasia opponents who believe in God say that because God is the giver of life, God alone has the right to decide when to end it. They believe that suffering can have a great benefit for the individual and for the world when the person who is suffering “offers it up” (which begs the question of whether there is a God at all or why a God would want such offerings). They say that a final illness is can be a grace-filled transitional time of preparation for eternal life and that it should not be cut short by human intervention.

Opponents also paint a narrow-minded picture of the current state of health care practice when they protest that people should not be encouraged into suicide. And they are outraged at the thought that people may be euthanized without their consent.

Those out of touch moralists don’t have a clue how maudlin it sounds when they say that true compassion means that we care for people--not we kill them when they are ill or defective in some way that makes us uncomfortable. There’s that judgmental use of the loaded word “kill” again.

Such beliefs fly in the face of everything we know in our day about the primary importance of taking care of our own needs. As my favorite philosopher Ayn Rand sagely wrote in her books, survival of the fittest mandates that we minimize the costs to society and realistically not waste our time and money on those too weak to take care of themselves.

Admittedly, it is hard to think clearly at such moments, but one must keep in mind that what good parents want above all is what is best for their children. You can console yourself with the assurance that if they were able to think clearly at the time, your parents would really want not to be a burden, distress you with their pain, or cause you financial loss.

As my conversations with Bill reminded me, keeping them alive past when it is time for them to go is not to anyone’s benefit.

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Legislation for what is cynically called compassionate end of life care has already been passed in many states, and euthanasia with or without patients’ consent is already commonplace in the Netherlands and other countries. This satire is based on an article in Slate magazine titled “When Should You Put Your Dog Down?” By Jon Katz. Because so many of the ideas Mr. Katz propounded in 2003 sound like what people say these days about "mercy killing," I wrote this fictional article.

There is nothing new in the attitudes expressed in this little satire. I found a good example of the very same attitudes described in a work of fiction from the middle of the twentieth century, in Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, which was written in the 1940s. Agatha Christie wrote it during WWII when thought she might die in the London bombings, then it put away in a bank vault. It was finally published in 1975, the year before Christie died.

Judith, Captain Hastings' beautiful twenty-one year old daughter, and a sympathetic character loved by both her father and by "Uncle" Poirot, was one of the group gathered together at the guest house in the book; she was in love with a married doctor who was married to an invalid wife. Judith quite vehemently expressed her philosophy several times without much authorial comment. She was adamantly sure that when anyone is making anyone's life miserable or is useless, that person should be eliminated. "Old people, sick people should not be allowed to ruin the lives of others!"

When a murder case was discussed in which a father was killed by one of his daughters because he was too controlling, Judith said, "I think she was very brave." When asked what her lover the doctor would think, Judith blurted out that he thought the victim had it coming to him. "Some people just ask to be murdered." "I don't hold life as sacred as you people do," she interjected.

In a conversation at dinner table in the story, "everybody knew" that the "unfit" should not be kept around to drain the resources of the "fit" and contaminate the gene pool. The only real question seemed was whether the unfit should be put out of the way if they didn't ask for it. She called killing such a person putting someone out of their misery. "It shouldn't be up to the patient." And, she added, especially when a loved one's life is useless, "someone who loves them" has to take the responsibility," and be brave enough to do the right thing even at risk of being tried for murder.

Nowadays in 2016, most people don't talk openly about getting rid of defectives so they don't contaminate the gene pool (even though we quietly kill most babies with defects before they are even born in these dark days). But the idea that a sick parent should be put down when the time comes, which already seemed perfectly obvious to educated upper class unbelievers in the 1940s, is obviously getting more acceptable to everyone every year--except to a dwindling few who still hold that life is sacred. These days the deterrent of possibly being prosecuted for "mercy-killing" is being stricken from the laws in many places, and we don't even have to sully our own hands. In more and more countries and states, a Doctor Death or his nurse assistant will do the dirty deed for us.

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