Royal Physicians. . - Reviews - Royal Proxes and Potions: The Lives of Court Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries - book review

Richard Whittington-Egan

Royal Proxes and Potions: The Lives of Court Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries. Raymond Lamont-Brown. Sutton Publishing. [pounds sterling]20.00. 306 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2513-2.

The roll call of royal physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries across the centuries has embodied many fascinating characters, some larger than life, some, temporarily, larger than death, some perpetrators of acts and activities that have raised doubts and deliberations. Indeed, as comparatively recently as 1936 the question was put in all seriousness, 'Was King George V murdered by his doctors?'

His Britannic Majesty lay in extremis at Sandringham House. They had earlier tried to comfort him with the assurance, implying a resurgence, that he would soon be off to Bognor Regis, his place of usual convalescence -- a place which, truth to tell, he much disliked, only to call forth what were allegedly the notoriously rough-tongued Sailor King's last words -- 'Bugger Bognor!'

It was 11.55 p.m. on January 20th, 1936, the time of His Majesty's life having moved, as his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, put it in his bulletin, handwritten on a Sandringham menu card, 'peacefully towards its close'. It is said that it was considered meet in the royal household that the tidings of the monarch's death should be first enshrined in the dignified columns of The Times, rather than in the pages of the lightweight London evenings. So . . . Dawson is said to have hastened the inevitable royal departure with a timeous lethal injection of morphia and cocaine into the regal jugular, giving syringe-needle sharpness to Dawson's old adversary and surgical peer, Baron Moynihan's, pricking measure of poetic justice:

Lord Dawson of Penn

Has killed lots of men

So that's why we sing

God Save the King.

Equally, it could be the cure that kills. In the case of Charles II, who suffered a stroke on February 1st, 1685, his physicians bled him, purged him, shaved his head and applied blister-raising cantharides plasters to his scalp, pressed red-hot irons upon his skin, administered enemas of rock salt and syrup of buckthorn and orange infusion of metals in white wine. They induced him to swallow therapeutic potions of oriental bezoar stone from the stomach of a goat and boiled spirits from a human skull. On February 7th, his body red raw with burns and inflammation, succumbing, wisely it might be thought, to his heroic treatment, the King lapsed into a merciful coma and died. A pretty safe diagnosis: iatrogenic regicide!

Although the healing art had made -- and was making -- giant strides by her day, Queen Victoria's view of its practitioners was somewhat less than exalted. She looked upon them as 'at least a species of servant', and certainly not to be classed with the officers of her Forces. Herself a sufferer from mega-hypochondriasis, and addicted to such dubious commercial specifics as Wordsdell's Vegetable Restorative Pills and Congreve's Balsamic Elixir, she, as a kind of health insurance, made sure that her medicos received regular prompt fee-payments and periodic baronetcies.

In Mr. Lamont-Brown's most amusing, informative, and astonishingly well and widely researched book, one is constantly coming across the sort of characters that seem as though they ought to have been invented by Conan Doyle or Dr Richard Gordon: Sir William Gull, physician-extraordinary to Queen Victoria, reputed to have prescribed an abortifacient for Alexandra, Princess of Wales, in 1877, who was called in to The Priory, Balham, to see the dying Charles Bravo, victim in the celebrated poisoning case of 1876, and has latterly been suspected of being Jack the Ripper; Sir Frederick Treves, whose operation for appendicitis on Edward VII made history, and who took under his charitable medical wing Joseph Merrick, the so-called 'Elephant Man', pathetically suffering from the dreadfully disfiguring disorder, multiple neurofibromatosis, and who, before his rescue from a Whitechapel side-show, was being exhibited and cruelly mocked as a freak.

The book is positively packed with most interesting stories and medical sidelights. That of Prince John, for instance, 'the little prince the nation forgot'. Another medical character, Sir Alan Manby, royal surgeon-apothecary, drew back the curtain on the unpretty story of how the boy's parents, George V and Queen Mary, sacrificed the little epileptic creature 'to keep up royal appearances'.

Mr. Lamont-Brown has provided a thoroughly absorbing and worthwhile volume.

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