The Queen’s health has been monitored intensively throughout her reign, but no more so than in recent years as she has aged and experienced periods of being unwell.
The royal household has its own team of medics, who are on call 24 hours a day. They are led by Prof Sir Huw Thomas, head of the medical household and physician to the Queen – a title dating back to 1557.
Thomas has been part of the team of royal physicians for 16 years and became the Queen’s personal physician in 2014.
The role is not full-time and does not have fixed hours or sessions but Thomas is available whenever he is needed.
Thomas received a knighthood in the 2021 new year honours, and was made Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) – a personal gift of the monarch. At the time of the honour, in an interview with Imperial College London, he said it had been a “busy couple of years in this role,” adding that he felt “very grateful to have been recognised for my service to date”.
Thomas added that being the Queen’s personal physician was a “great honour” and “a very enjoyable and rewarding role”.
He said: “The nature of the work is interesting because you see how a whole different organisation, the royal household, operates. You very much become part of that organisation and become the personal doctor to the principal people in it, who are patients just like other patients.”
Thomas is a consultant at King Edward VII’s hospital (the private hospital in Marylebone often used by members of the royal family, including the late Prince Philip) and St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, and professor of gastrointestinal genetics at Imperial College London. He is also director of the Family Cancer Clinic at St Mark’s hospital in Harrow, north-west London.
Thomas has also been involved in delivering members of the royal family and was part of the team who looked after the Duchess of Cambridge when she gave birth to daughter Charlotte in 2015 and youngest son, Louis, in 2018 at St Mary’s hospital, Paddington.
Before 2015, when she ended her foreign royal tours, a Royal Navy doctor would accompany the Queen overseas – with the doctor taking responsibility for researching the medical facilities available to the Queen wherever she was.
According to Harry Mount, the author of How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don’t Talk to Our Neighbours, travelling doctors would travel with a defibrillator and a considerable supply of emergency medicine and blood packs would be taken to places with unreliable blood supplies.
In previous generations the royal doctor has caused controversy. When the Queen’s grandfather King George V was in his final hours, Lord Dawson, the royal doctor with personal responsibility for the 70-year-old monarch issued a bulletin, declaring: “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.”
In 1986, four decades after Lord Dawson’s death, his diaries were made public – revealing that he had administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to relieve the King’s pain, but also to ensure that the death could be announced in the morning edition of the Times, rather than “less appropriate evening journals”.
